GEORGE  MOORE 


BY  THE   SAME   AUTHOR 

THE  LIVING  CHALICE 

AIDS  TO  THE   IMMORTALITY  OF  CERTAIN 
PERSONS   IN   IRELAND 


GEORGE  MOORE 


BY 

SUSAN   L.    MITCHELL 


NEW   YORK 

DODD,   MEAD   &   CO. 

1916 


TO 

"JE"   and   JOHN   EGLINTON 

WHO  ALONE  WERE  TREATED  MERCIFULLY 

BY  THE   AUTHOR  OF  "AVE,  SALVE  AND  VALE 

AND  WHO  ARE  THEREFORE  NOT  LIKELY 

TO   BE   INDIGNANT  AT  THE  ASSOCIATION  OF 

THEIR  NAMES  WITH  THIS  STUDY  OF 

GEORGE  MOORE 


35799.L 


GEORGE   MOORE 


George  Moore  might  have  cried  with  Walt 
Whitman  :  "  Do  I  contradict  myself  ?  Very 
well,  I  contradict  myself.  I  contain  multi- 
tudes." He  has  paraded  before  us  un- 
abashed, in  a  multitudinous  personality ; 
ashamed  of  only  one  George  Moore,  the 
little  Catholic  boy  of  that  name  who  went 
to  confession.  Yet  why  should  he  whose 
whole  life  has  been  spent  in  making  con- 
fessions object  to  confession  ?  Perhaps  it 
was  the  privacy  of  the  confessional  that 
affronted  him,  that  so  much  good  copy 
should  be  wasted,  poured  into  the  ears  of 
unliterary  priests,  whose  lips  were  sealed 
and  unable  to  retail  all  that  valuable 
material.  Of  course  as  a  literary  man  he 
would  deny  the  Catholic  George  Moore,  and 
as  I  do  not  desire  to  wound  him  I  will  not 
refer  any  more  to  this  child  who  was  so 
likely  a  father  to  the  man  we  know  ;  no 
need  to  when  we  have  Moore  the  pagan, 
Moore  the  Protestant,  Moore  the  artist, 
Moore  the  realist,  Moore  the  stylist,  Moore 


GEORGE  MOORE 


\ 


the  patriot,  Moore  the  anti-Irishman,  Moore 
the  dramatist  :  all  personalities  which  he 
himself  has  revealed  to  us  in  the  most  en- 
chanting fiction.  I  will  come  to  each  of 
these  personalities  in  turn,  but  I  shall  begin 
,  with  the  only  one  of  which  he  himself  is  not 
/  the  creator,  the  George  Moore,  minted  in 
Mayo,  stamped  somewhere  towards  the 
middle  of  the  last  century  with  an  unmis- 
takable Irish  birthright  which  he  has  never 
been  able  to  obliterate. 

I  have  had  great  difficulty  in  collecting 
any  facts  about  this  George  Moore,  prin- 
cipally because  the  Celt  is  averse  from  facts, 
and  when  I  enquired  certain  things  of  those 
who  knew  him  intimately,  I  was  swept  off 
my  feet  by  a  torrent  of  opinions.  Mr.  Moore 
has  always  been  a  troubler  of  the  waters  of 
opinion.  Even  in  the  matter  of  his  age  the 
records  do  not  help  us.  Doubtless  the  gods 
who  predestined  him  to  immortality  saw  to 
it  that  his  beginnings  were  shrouded  from 
the  measurements  of  time.  Computing  by 
the  light  of  mere  mortality,  we  find  recorded 
in  "Who's  Who"  that  his  first  published 
work,  "  Poems  of  Passion,"  appeared  in 
1878.  As  he  must  at  least  have  known  how 
to  read  when  these  appeared,  there  is  some- 
thing to  be  said  for  dating  his  birth  from 
the  early  fifties,  and  we  will  proceed  on  that 
assumption.  , 

George  Moore,  then,  was  born  perhaps  in 
10 


GEORGE  MOORE 


1852,  the  eldest  son  of  George  Henry  Moore, 
of  Moore  Hall,  in  the  county  of  Mayo,  in 
the  province  of  Connaught  in  Ireland. 
George  Henry  Moore  was  a  distinguished 
Irishman,  and  his  life  has  been  ably  written 
by  his  son,  Colonel  Maurice  Moore.  He 
might  be  said  to  have  been  the  founder  of 
the  Independent  Party  in  Irish  politics, 
but  his  political  intelligence  undoubtedly 
did  not  descend  to  his  son  George. 

George  Moore,  who  describes  with  such 
fidelity  of  detail  the  personal  appearance  of 
the  characters  in  his  novels,  should  delight 
in  seeing  himself  portrayed  by  another 
artist,  and  as  this  chapter  purports  to  deal 
with  the  outer  George  Moore,  I  will  recall  my 
own  first  impressions.  It  was  my  lot  to  be 
living  in  London  when  what  calls  itself  the 
Irish  revival  was  surging  there,  for  we  must 
not  forget  that  London  was  the  source  of 
that  upsetting  wave  which  draggled  all  our 
crisp  young  feathers.  To  me,  shortsighted 
from  my  obscurity  in  midland  Ireland,  the 
greatness  of  London  was  not  in  its  literary 
persons  but  in  the  city  itself.  It  submerged 
me,  and  I  instinctively  raised  myself  on 
the  shoulders  nearest  me.  It  was  doubtless 
luck  for  me  that  these  shoulders  belonged 
to  such  as  the  Yeats,  Martyn,  Moore,  Lady 
Gregory,  Ashe  King,  but  at  first  I  did  not 
know  my  luck.  I  thought  that  these  people 
were    merely    ornaments    for    the    drawing- 

11 


GEORGE  MOORE 


\ 


room  ;  afterwards  I  realised  they  were  orna- 
ments for  the  world. 

I  lived  with  the  Yeats  in  Blenheim  Road — 
and  what  a  lovely  book  I  shall  write  some 
day  about  that  most  companionable  house- 
hold. 

To  me  the  persons  I  met  there  were  not 
at  first  either  intellects  or  notabilities,  they 
were  mere  society.  After  a  little — being  of 
a  mind  with  our  old  friend  Prince  Arthur  of 
the  Tennysonian  idyll— I  "needs  must  love 
the  highest  "  when  I  saw  it,  I  recognised 
them  and  all  their  company  for  what  they 
were.  So  it  came  to  pass  that  though  of 
small  account  myself,  and  not  now  even  in 
the  memory  of  most  of  these  — I  was  free  of 
a  great  company,  and  my  mind,  a  little 
overawed  by  W.  B.  Yeats,  Martyn  and 
Lady  Gregory  and  always  inclined  to  levity, 
fastened  itself  on  a  name  that  seemed  to 
give  a  lightsome  mood  to  whosoever  men- 
tioned it,  and  I  grew  curious  about  Moore. 
Yet  when  at  the  rehearsal  of  "  Countess 
Cathleen  "  in  some  dark  by-way  of  London, 
I  was  told  he  was  present,  I  cannot  recall 
any  form,  only  an  irritation  in  the  dusty 
atmosphere.  When  next  I  met  George 
Moore  it  was  in  my  own  city  Dublin,  where 
every  brewer  pleases  and  only  literature  is 
vile,  but  I,  who  still  trailed  some  of  the 
clouds  of  reverence  that  I  brought  with  me 
from  London,  looked  at  this  man  of  wicked 

12 


GEORGE  MOORE 


books  with  an  excitement  that  even  irre- 
verent Dublin  could  not  damp.  It  occurred 
to  me  to  wonder  at  what  age  Satan  brands 
his  votaries,  as  they  told  us  in  the  Sunday-\ 
school  books  and  as  I  still  believed,  because 
Moore,  who  everyone  said  was  a  very  wicked 
man,  had  the  rosy  face  and  innocent  yellow 
hair  of  young  virtue,  kindness  was  on  his 
lips,  though  his  eyes  were  not  quite  so  kind, 
a  little  slow  in  following  the  lips.  I  had 
met  in  London  another  yellow-haired  writer, 
but  he  was  pale  and  pasty  of  complexion  — 
and  Moore  was  not  like  Symons.  No,  he 
was  not  like  Symons ;  it  counted  in  his 
favour.  George  Moore  seemed  to  me  theiT 
to  be  a  man  of  middle  height  with  an  egg-  I 
shaped  face  and  head,  light  yellow  hair  in 
perpetual  revolt  against  the  brush,  a  stout 
nose  with  thick  nostrils,  grey-green  eyes, 
remarkable  eyes,  a  mouth  inclined  to  pet- 
tishness,  lips  thick  in  the  middle  as  if  a  bee 
had  stung  them.  He  had  champagne  shoul- 
ders and  a  somewhat  thick,  ungainly  figure, 
but  he  moved  about  a  room  with  a  grace 
which  is  not  of  Dublin  drawing-rooms. 
Afterwards,  seeing  George  Moore  in  the 
street,  I  found  he  was  the  only  man  in 
Dublin  who  walked  fashionably r The  strange 
word  suits  him  ;  perhaps  he  is  the  last  man 
of  fashion  in  these  islands.  He  wore  an 
opera  hat.  Nobody  in  Dublin  wears  an 
opera  hat,  and,  when  Moore  put  it  like  a 

13 


GEORGE  MOORE 


crown  upon  his  yellow  head  or  crushed  it 
fashionably  under  his  arm,  it  acted  on 
Dublin  like  an  incantation.  I  remember 
my  own  instantaneous  homage. 

This  description  I  feel  to  be  inadequate, 
and  I  have  summoned  to  my  aid  the  folk- 
lore of  Dublin.  Dublin  is  a  crater  of  epithet, 
and  whenever  George  Moore  is  mentioned 
out  of  the  crater  boil  up  such  phrases  as 
"  an  over-ripe  gooseberry,"  "  a  great  big 
intoxicated  baby,"  "  a  satyr,"  "  a  boiled 
ghost,"  "  a  gosling."  I  am  not  satisfied 
with  these  descriptions,  they  are  florid  and 
untidy,  and  all  descriptions  suffer  in  com- 
parison with  Moore's  own  perfect  etching  of 
a  portrait.  He  speaks  in  the  latest  of  his 
prefaces  of  his  "  sloping  shoulders  and  long 
female  hands,"  with  the  feeling  of  a  true 
artist.  True  there  are  painted  portraits  of 
George  Moore.  One  by  Miss  Harrison  in 
which  she  has  set  her  own  benevolence  on 
her  sitter's  brow  and  her  own  candour  in 
his  eyes.  It  is  not  her  portrait,  however, 
which  is  most  truly  symbolic  of  Moore,  but  the 
famous  portrait  by  Manet.  In  my  (borrowed) 
copy  of  "  Modern  Painting,"  when  I  came 
across  in  the  essay  on  Manet  the  words  "  He 
never  painted  anything  that  he  did  not 
make  beautiful,"  I  found  them  underlined 
by  some  waggish  reader  with  a  reference  to 
the  number  of  the  page  on  which  the  repro- 
duction  of  the   Manet   portrait   appeared  ! 

14 


GEORGE  MOORE 


That  portrait  which  is  like  nothing  so  much 
as  the  human  symbol  of  a  high-explosive 
shell. 

George  Moore's  is  a  face  dear  to  the 
caricaturist  and  in  itself  at  times  a  carica- 
ture :  the  yellow  hair,  the  fat  features,  the 
sly  smile,  the  malice,  the  vanity.  But  as 
has  been  said  to  me,  let  someone  begin  to 
discuss  an  idea  and  in  a  moment  the  con- 
tours change,  the  fat  shapelessness  falls 
away,  the  jaw  lengthens,  the  bones  become 
visible,  the  eyes  darken,  the  brows  straighten, 
a  hawk-like  keenness  is  in  the  look.  One 
does  not  caricature  this  Moore  ;  it  is  the 
face  of  the  thinker,  the  man  who  handles 
ideas  like  a  master.  There  is  a  duality  in 
Moore  that  at  once  repels  and  fascinates 
and  makes  a  study  of  him  a  delightful 
adventure  in  characterisation. 

I  am  not  a  great  reader  and  rarely  read 
critically,  but  in  my  skimmings  over  fiction 
I  cannot  recall  any  writer  so  continuously 
implicated  in  his  own  work  as  George  Moore, 
The  creative  mind,  following  the  highest 
example,  leaves  its  creatures  once  formed  to 
fend  for  themselves.  They  are  most  close 
and  cherished,  an  agony  and  a  delight  till 
they  have  taken  shape  and  started  on  their 
own  lives,  then  one  feels  them  a  part  of 
one's  self  no  more,  they  are  separate  beings. 
The  child  sets  out  to  play  his  part  in  life. 
That  is,  perhaps,  why  the  writer  who  most 

15 


GEORGE  MOORE 


lays  bare  his  soul  in  creation  feels  so  little 
intimacy,  so  little  modesty,  when  his  thought 
confronts  him  later  on  the  printed  page. 
It  is  no  more  bone  of  his  bone,  but,  lord  of 
its  own  body,  it  has  begun  to  form  its  own 
ties. 

George  Moore  does  not  seem  to  me  to 
create  in  this  fashion.  His  production  is 
more  like  that  of  the  banyan  tree  whose 
own  branches  spring  up  into  trees  all  round 
it,  never  detaching  themselves  from  their 
parent,  but  in  their  many  lives  are  one  tree. 
George  in  his  many  books  is  but  one  George, 
he  never  loses  sight  of  any  of  his  selves  in 
any  of  his  works,  but  returns  continually 
to  write  new  prefaces  to  old  books,  re- 
animating in  turn  each  of  his  dead  memories. 
This  is  why  I  find  it  impossible  to  write 
of  George  Moore's  works  apart  from  George 
himself.  Though  I  shall  do  my  best  as  a 
conscientious  writer  to  examine  the  writings 
severally,  I  know  that  I  cannot  hide  from 
him  in  his  banyan  grove,  he  will  spring  at 
me  from  behind  every  one  of  his  own 
saplings ;  although  as  a  poet,  in  which 
character  I  shall  first  consider  him,  he  has 
been  more  successful  in  concealing  himself 
than  in  any  other. 


16 


II 

Mr.  Moore,  though  never  a  penitent,  has 
confessed  himself  so  abundantly  in  all  his 
work  that  his  biographer's  task  should  be 
an  easy  one.  If  we  examine  the  matter 
closely,  however,  we  shall  see  that  while 
Rousseau,  eminent  among  confessors,  made 
confessions  all  about  himself,  Mr.  Moore's 
are  largely  about  his  friends.  As  a  poet, 
however,  Mr.  Moore  presents  few  difficulties. 
It  is  easy  to  understand  how  a  young  man, 
heady  with  vanity  and  conscious  of  some 
literary  power,  should  first  seek  in  verse  a 
medium  of  expression.  He  himself  said 
once  :  "  Every  young  man  of  literary  talent 
has  one  volume  of  poems  in  him  when  he  is 
young ;  the  test  of  a  poet  is  whether  he  can 
still  write  poems  when  he  is  fifty  !  ':  Judged 
by  this  his  own  standard,  Mr.  Moore  is  not 
a  poet.  He  published  two  volumes  of 
poetry,  "  Flowers  of  Passion  "  in  1878,  and 
"  Pagan  Poems  "  in  1881.  In  neither  of 
these  is  there  much  more  than  competent 
versifying.  They  are  wanting  in  that  sin- 
cerity which  is  in  nearly  all  his  prose  ;  they 
are  artful  and  more  than  a  trifle  perverse. 
But  for  this  latter  quality  they  might  have 

b  17 


GEORGE  MOORE 


been  written  by  any  of  those  beneficed  and 
leisured  clergymen  whose  elegantly  bound 
volumes  of  classically  flavoured  verse  are 
in  so  many  eighteenth-century  book  collec- 
tions. The  patient  cataloguer  knows  them 
well,  and  knowing,  yawns.  In  perhaps  only 
two  poems  of  Mr.  Moore's,  "  Ode  to  a  Dead 
Body"  and  "The  Beggar  Girl,"  is  there  a 
hint  of  that  sympathy  which  afterwards, 
when  he  had  found  his  real  mode  of  expres- 
sion as  a  novelist,  made  "  Esther  Waters  " 
the  best  of  all  his  novels. 

Mr.  Moore  is  so  interesting  to  a  biographer 
as  a  human  being,  as  a  novelist  and  as  a 
critic,  why  should  I  make  any  bones  of  dis- 
missing his  claims  as  a  poet  ?  A  story  I 
have  been  told  of  Mr.  Moore's  boyhood 
makes  an  appropriate  comment  on  his 
verse.  He  chose  as  a  treat  for  his  tenth 
birthday  to  be  dressed  up  to  resemble  a 
Greek  of  Syria.  With  an  ornamental  sword 
and  mounted  on  a  grey  pony  with  Eastern 
trappings  he  was  led  around  his  father's 
demesne  to  the  wonder  of  the  peasants. 
His  love  of  "  dressing  up  "  made  him  write 
erse  as  it  made  him  study  painting. 
It  will  not  surprise  anybody  who  has 
read  Mr.  Moore's  verse  to  learn  that  his 
favourite  poets  are  Shelley  and  Swinburne. 
His  two  volumes  are  a  whole  whispering 
gallery  full  of  echoes.  It  is  amazing  to  see 
a  man  who  began  by  so  servile  an  imitation 

18 


r 


GEORGE  MOORE 


of  other  men  develop  the  astonishing  origin- 
ality of  "  Ave,  Salve  and  Vale." 

As  well  as  these  two  volumes  of  poems, 
Mr.  Moore  collaborated  with  a  friend  in 
"  Martin  Luther,"  a  tragedy  in  blank  verse. 
I  have  been  told  that  a  literary  friend  in 
Dublin  once  asked  him  about  "  Martin 
Luther."  He  instantly  sprang  from  his  chair 
and  clutching  his  flaxen  locks  walked  fran- 
tically about  his  room  wailing :  "  What 
have  I  ever  done  to  you  that  you  should 
remind  me  of  this  thing  ?  "  It  is  so  difficult 
to  get  a  copy  of  this  work  to-day  that  I  am 
tempted  to  believe  Mr.  Moore  bought  up 
the  copies  himself  and  destroyed  them. 

Every  now  and  then  when  he  was  in 
Dublin  Mr.  Moore  would  discover  a  new 
poet  and  try  him  on  the  stony  silence  of 
John  Eglinton.  His  faith  in  Swinburne  was 
somewhat  shaken  by  the  steady  refusal  of 
the  Irish  school  of  poets  to  see  more  in 
him  than  eloquent  emptiness.  "  Flowers  of 
Passion,"  however,  fetches  up  to  £8  from 
collectors,  and  will  continue  to  go  up  in 
price  no  doubt,  in  spite  of  this  chapter. 


19 


Ill 

„ 

Nobody  in  Ireland  has  ever  seen  any  of 
Mr.  Moore's  paintings  except  "iE,"  to 
whom  he  once  shyly  showed  a  head,  remark- 
ing that  it  had  some  "quality."  "M " 
remained  silent. 


20 


IV 

When  I  come  to  speak  of  Mr.  Moore  as  a 
critic  I  have  nothing  but  my  mother  wit 
to  guide  me.  As  to  the  intrinsic  value  of 
his  criticism,  I  have  not  the  knowledge 
which  would  enable  me  to  gauge  it.  This 
defect  of  mine  has  always  been  a  great 
trouble  to  me,  though  Mr.  Balfour  wrote 
encouraging  words  to  such  as  I  when,  after 
profound  examination  into  the  question  of 
criteria,  he  decided  there  were  none  save 
personal  preference.  Should  I  be  timid  in 
following  where  so  intrepid  a  thinker  has 
led  the  way  ? 

Mr.  Moore  wrote  "  Impressions  and 
Opinions  "  in  1890,  and  "  Modern  Painting  " 
in  1893.  To  many  people  these  books  of 
criticism  are  by  far  the  most  interesting  of 
his  work.  He  has  a  great  deal  to  say  about 
writing  and  painting  and  he  is  so  interested 
in  both  these  arts  that  he  compels  our 
interest.  He  knows  why  he  likes  a  painter 
or  a  writer  and  he  tells  us  why  with  all  the 
skill  of  language  he  possesses.  Nobody 
does  this  quite  in  Mr.  Moore's  way,  because 
very  few  people  bring  such  a  momentum  of 
personality  to  bear  upon  their  writing.     At 

21 


GEORGE  MOORE 


the  moment  I  can  think  of  no  writer  about 
writers  to  compare  him  with,  except  Chester- 
ton, and  I  am  aware  that  it  is  an  unfair 
comparison  and  exposes  at  once  the  lack  in 
Mr.  Moore's  writing.  Mr.  Chesterton  is 
indeed  a  shower  of  star  dust  rather  than  a 
star,  yet  if  that  shining  dust  of  epigram  had 
an  organic  unity  he  might  be  one  of  the  great 
writers  of  the  world.  He  has  been  brushed 
by  the  wing  of  genius,  and  Mr.  Moore,  whose 
altars  are  never  cold  — for  he  has  made  many 
a  burnt  offering — has  never  been  able  to 
lure  the  winged  ones  his  way. 

Yet  his  art  as  a  writer  is  a  genuine  art. 
But  while  his  writing  about  writers  is  always 
very  interesting,  his  writing  about  painting 
is  a  different  and  a  greater  thing.  I  explain 
it  to  myself  this  way.  He  married  his  art 
as  a  writer  and  settled  down  comfortably 
enough  beside  her  for  life,  he  will  never 
leave  her,  he  would  be  lost  without  her. 
Painting  he  loved,  but  did  not  marry.  It 
was  an  unrequited  love.  All  the  ardour  of 
his  youth  went  out  to  her.  He  worked  hard 
in  her  service  but  she  would  have  none  of 
him.  All  he  knows  of  romance  is  on  that 
side  of  his  nature.  This  warms  us  as  we 
read  his  "  Modern  Painting."  We  know  as 
he  writes  about  painting  that  his  adoring 
eye  is  still  on  the  palette  which  will  never 
do  his  bidding.  He  loved  those  colours,  he 
knew  all  they  could  do  for  others  but  they 

22 


GEORGE  MOORE 


never  glowed  for  him.  Hence  every  sen- 
tence he  writes  about  pictures  he  rolls  upon 
his  tongue,  it  is  a  sweet  morsel,  and  he  gives 
us  with  full  justice  every  particle  of  its 
flavour.  That  one  should  smell  the  paint 
in  these  sentences  is  not  wonderful.  Some- 
one told  me  that  Mr.  Moore  said  he  loved 
the  smell  of  oil  paint  better  than  the  smell 
of  flowers.  Where  one  disagrees  with  Mr. 
Moore's  criticism — and  who  agrees  with  any- 
one's criticism  ?— is  perhaps,  as  has  been  said 
to  me,  because  he  cares  more  for  art  than 
nature  and  for  painting  than  for  art. 

"  Impressions  and  Opinions  "  are  very 
much  Moore  weighted  with  all  his  sincere 
and  unreasonable  personality  ;  serious  and 
reverent  as  in  the  Balzac  article  where  he 
helps  us  to  look  just  for  an  instant  into  that 
million  -  peopled  brain  ;  in  the  impressions 
of  Turgenieff,  Verlaine,  Zola,  the  Two 
Unknown  Poets,  full  of  as  keen  a  scent  for 
literature  as  the  foxhound  for  the  fox.  That 
he  does  not  always  "  kill  "  is  part  of  the 
charm  of  our  Moore  as  a  critic,  he  allows 
himself  to  be  deflected  from  his  object  as 
in  the  Zola  article  by  a  very  deliberate  ill- 
temper,  and  in  the  Turgenieff  article  by 
the  pettishness  that  makes  him  sell  his 
Dostoevsky  for  a  foolish  epigram.  In  "  Mum- 
mer Worship  "  he  enjoys  himself,  as  we  all 
do  when  dignifying  our  personal  anti- 
pathies by  the  name  of  opinions  we  give 

23 


GEORGE  MOORE 


our  public  "  a  piece  of  our  mind."  The 
articles  on  "  the  Salon  Julien  "  and  "  De- 
gas," the  "  Rencontre  in  a  Salon,"  "  the 
New  Pictures  in  the  National  Gallery " 
really  should  belong  to  "Modern  Painting" 
and  are  as  at  home  there  as  Moore  himself 
in  the  company  of  oil  tubes  and  easels. 

It  has  been  said  to  me  of  Mr.  Moore  that 
he  had  enough  credulity  to  make  him  a 
bishop,  but  that  he  met  Manet  before  he 
met  Christ  and  that  to  Manet  he  has  given 
all  he  knows  of  worship.  However  orches- 
trated his  art  criticism,  however  various  the 
instruments  he  employs,  whatsoever  painters 
he  writes  about,  one  theme  runs  through 
all  the  essays — Manet.  One  doxology  ends 
them  all :  "  Glory  be  to  Manet,  to  the  most 
potent  squeezer  of  the  fat  oil  tube,  to  the 
last  manufacturer  of  quality  in  oil  painting." 

And  one  understands  it  so  well.  Mr. 
Moore's  romantic  devotion  to  painting,  his 
long  effort  to  use  colour,  that  real  under- 
standing and  appreciation  of  what  it  could 
do  that  is  most  certainly  revealed  in  every 
article  he  wrote  about  painting,  and  his 
pathetic  failure  to  do  anything  he  wanted 
with  it  !  No  lover  ever  poured  his  unre- 
quited love  in  sonnet  with  more  passion 
than  Mr.  Moore  in  these  essays  has  sung  his 
unrequited  love  of  oil  paint ;  this  love 
that  even  affected  his  politics  and  made 
him    a    traitor    to    the    reigning    house    in 

24 


GEORGE  MOORE 


England  because  they  did  not  possess  a 
Manet  among  them.  Manet  could  do  all 
things  with  paint.  What  a  god !  He  calls 
his  essays,  "  Whistler,"  "  Corot,"  "  Ingres," 
"Chavannes,"  "Millet,"  "Monet,"  "De- 
gas "  ;  he  might  have  called  them  all 
"  Manet,"  so  much  do  we  surmise  behind 
all  his  great  archetype.  His  "  Modern 
Painting,"  with  its  many  essays,  sings  the 
Benedicite  Omnia  Opera  of  the  god  Manet. 

One  suspects  that  he  did  not  jump  into 
this  worship  of  Manet  all  at  once,  but  that 
his  love  for  the  unpopular  Manet  was  a 
reaction  from  a  love  of  some  popular  painter 
like  Dore.  His  ardour  is  that  of  the  convert. 
I  have  been  converted  and  I  know. 

That  Mr.  Moore's  art  criticism  has  a 
devastating  quality  at  times  is  illustrated 
in  his  "  Modern  Painting  "  by  the  article 
on  the  Victorian  Exhibition.  It  is  not  so 
much  a  consideration  of  the  art  as  the 
explosion  of  a  mine  under  it.  In  conversa- 
tion this  devastating  quality  was  happily 
illustrated  when  he  visited  a  friend  who  had 
an  immense  picture  by  Sargent  of  three 
ladies  seated  amid  high-class  furniture.  It 
was  hung  in  the  dining-room,  but  during 
dinner  George  never  lifted  his  eyes  to  look 
at  it.  "  You  have  not  looked  at  my  Sargent, 
Mr.  Moore,"  his  hostess  at  last  said.  "  No," 
said  George,  "  I  was  afraid  you  would  speak 
about  it.     I  don't  like  it.     But  I  have  just 

25 


GEORGE  MOORE 


been  talking  to  somebody  who  saw  it  at  the 
Academy  and  who  admires  it  tremendously." 
"  Would  he  like  to  come  here  and  see  it 
again  ?  "  asked  his  hostess.  "  No,  I  don't 
think  you  would  like  him  to  come,"  said 
Moore.  "  You  see,  he  is  my  greengrocer. 
He  likes  pictures  and  he  talks  about  them 
to  me  when  I  go  to  pay  my  bills.  '  Oh,  Mr. 
Moore,'  he  said,  '  wasn't  it  a  beautiful  pic- 
ture ?  Here  were  the  young  ladies  on  the 
sofa  and  you  knew  the  footmen  were  on 
the  stairs  handing  up  the  young  gentlemen, 
and  they  were  drinking  champagne  all  day 
long.  It  was  real  high  life.'  And  that  is 
exactly  what  I  think  of  the  picture,"  con- 
cluded George;  "it's  just  the  greengrocer's 
idea  of  high  life." 

Mr.  Moore's  genuine  love  for  art  was  the 
tie  that  bound  him  to  many  strange  associ- 
ates ;  it  was  the  basis  of  his  love  for  Shelley, 
his  admiration  of  Yeats  and  "  M."  It  was 
John  Eglinton's  grace  in  turning  a  sentence 
that  secured  him  the  friendship  of  Moore, 
and  even  in  the  shearing  of  Edward  Martyn, 
conducted  with  all  the  ferocity  of  a  near 
relative,  the  wind  was  tempered  by  Moore's 
respect  for  Martyn' s  very  real  dramatic 
talent.  Indeed,  so  great  is  Mr.  Moore's 
love  for  art  that  I  believe  if  when  he  returned 
to  Ireland  he  had  found  good  stained  glass 
in  the  Catholic  churches,  and  altar  pieces 
there  by  artists  he  respected,  he  would  have 

26 


GEORGE  MOORE 


become  an  ardent  champion  of  the  Catholic 
faith,  and  Protestantism  would  never  have 
received  an  adherent  so  little  to  her  mind, 
and  whose  hunger  for  art  she  also  was  totally 
unable  to  satisfy.  For  I  can  never  believe 
that  it  was  the  parish  priest's  love  of  a  good 
dinner  that  drove  Mr.  Moore  from  that 
fold,  such  a  love  is  not  really  alien  to  Mr. 
Moore's  nature  and  could  be  no  stumbling- 
block  to  his  faith.  So  desirable  and  human 
a  characteristic  might  well  have  won  his 
praise,  if  to  the  love  of  a  good  dinner  the 
parish  priest  had  united  love  for  a  good 
picture. 


27 


Women,  I  feel,  are  only  intermittently  self- 
conscious  and  the  business  of  putting  to- 
gether the  wisdom  obtained  in  these  momen- 
tary glimpses  of  themselves  is  a  troublesome 
one,  because  they  live  only  occasionally  in 
their  minds  at  all.  Therefore  no  woman 
has  risen  up  to  write  a  book  containing  the 
whole  wisdom  of  woman,  and  I  for  one  pray 
that  such  an  one  may  never  arise  to  profane 
our  mysteries.  For  the  most  part  we  look 
to  men  to  reveal  us  to  ourselves.  Man  is 
our  logos,  articulate  on  our  behalf.  Women 
are,  I  think,  curious,  prying  creatures,  seeking 
mind.  I  can  easily  explain  to  myself  Mr. 
Moore's  ideas  about  women  and  why  they  are 
not  so  offensive  to  women  as  to  men.  There 
is  often  a  wreckage  of  women  about  the 
lives  of  prominent  writers  or  thinkers  or 
any  men  who  stand  above  their  fellows. 
They  attract  women  as  the  lighthouse  at- 
tracts the  birds,  and  the  wheeling  creatures 
die  of  exhaustion,  unable  to  reach  the  light 
and  unable  to  leave  it.  Mr.  Moore,  perhaps, 
makes  the  common  error  that  it  was  his 
person  and  not  the  light  they  fancied  on  his 
brow  that  lured  them.     Therefore  perhaps 

28 


GEORGE  MOORE 


he  and  they  are  quits.  The  sexes  perhaps 
are  always  quits,  and  when  Mr.  Moore  says 
such  and  such  a  one  was  or  was  not  his 
lover,  we  women  are  unmoved.  We  think 
he  is  rather  an  idiot  to  talk  so  much  about 
it,  and  we  can  only  comprehend  vicariously 
and  through  our  sympathy  with  them  the 
tremendous  to  do  men  raise  over  Mr. 
Moore's  breach  of  their  convention.  We 
make  him  a  present  most  cheerfully  of  any 
little  pleasure  he  gets  out  of  fancying  we 
are  in  love  with  him  while  we  crane  eagerly 
over  his  shoulder  to  read  what  he  writes 
about  us.  His  main  theme  in  his  novels  is 
love.  What  are  "  Evelyn  Innes  "  and  "  Sister  , 
Teresa"  but  the  only  novels  exclusively 
about  love  in  the  language  ?  Funny  person. 
Women  know  instinctively  all  he  knows 
about  love  and  more  also.  It  is  intellect 
we  are  after.  The  intellect  he  brings  to 
bear  upon  love  we  wash  out  of  his  novels  as 
carefully  as  the  miner  washes  the  gold  from 
the  clay. 

In  Mr.  Moore's  continual  occupation  with 
love  and  lovers  I  find  him  less  unpleasant 
than  many  of  the  English  novelists.  There 
is  a  less  adhesive  quality  in  his  coarseness, 
and  I  think  it  is  because  he  has  never  been 
able  even  to  simulate  passion.  His  nature  is 
strongly  biassed  in  one  direction,  but  his 
intellect  has  balanced  him  :  there  is  a  cold 
quality  in  it.    Passion  would,  perhaps,  have 

29 


GEORGE  MOORE 


spared  us  his  tiresome  preoccupation  with 
what  one  might  call  millinery  and  confec- 
tionery in  the  love  adventures  in  his  novels. 
But  how  absurd  I  am  !  Given  passion,  the 
novels  would  never  have  been  written.  In 
that  grotesque  character  of  his  where  mingles 
much  that  is  noble  with  much  that  is  base, 
I  think  that  beauty  has  never  had  her  lamp 
put  out.  It  seems  to  me  that  the  women  in 
Mr.  Moore's  novels  are  such  as  no  woman 
would  ever  draw  aside  her  skirts  from.  He 
has  not  created  a  wholly  unpleasant  woman, 
and  some  of  his  women  are  delightful  beings, 
docile  to  life,  mother-hearted,  full  of  wonder 
and  trust,  inimitably  kind.  We  can  recall 
Alice  in  "Muslin,"  Esther  Waters,  Kitty 
Hare,  Agnes  Lahens,  Evelyn  Innes.  We 
\  are  often  suspicious  that  Mr.  Moore  was  by 
nature  an  amiable  and  kindly  gentleman, 
who  ought  never  to  have  annoyed  anybody, 
but  either  a  false  idea  of  art  led  him  into 
evil  courses  or  a  natural  impishness  of 
temper,  which  no  training  could  subdue. 
Nature  never  intended  him  to  write  droll 
tales  like  Balzac.  He  is  not  at  home  in 
them,  and,  when  he  does  violence  to  our 
feelings,  I  suspect  he  does  violence  to  his 
own.  He  brazens  it  out,  of  course,  like  the 
nasty  little  boy  who  puts  out  his  tongue  at 
one,  and  does  it  all  the  more,  the  more  he 
thinks  it  annoys.  Is  there  a  little  devil  in 
Mr.  Moore  that  makes  him  want  to  annoy  ? 

30 


\ 


GEORGE  MOORE 


Most  of  us  owned  one  in  our  early  days, 
but  grown-up  obligations  made  us  put  the 
chain  on  him.  Mr.  Moore  has  never  grown 
up  and  his  little  devil  is  an  active  little 
beast. 

We  expect  this  impishness  in  Mr.  Moore 
annoys  his  men  more  than  his  women 
readers.  There  is  hardly  a  naughty  boy's 
trick  which  is  new  to  us  women  ;  we  have 
laid  the  rod  in  pickle  so  very  often.  Mr. 
Bernard  Shaw  understands  women  much 
better  than  Mr.  Moore,  but  we  do  not  like 
our  Bernard  ;  he  sees  too  much  with  that 
chill  grey  eye  of  his.  He  would  be  good  to 
us  in  actual  life,  clothe  us  and  feed  us 
and  give  us  good  wages,  but  what  woman 
can  forgive  "  Man  and  Superman  "  ?  Mr. 
Moore  in  actual  life  would  fly  from  all  that 
was  disagreeable  in  us,  unless  he  could  use 
it  for  literary  purposes.  It  would  not  be 
agreeable  to  him  to  work  at  social  problems 
like  Mr.  Shaw.  But  Mr.  Moore  pleases  us 
more  than  Mr.  Shaw.  Mr.  Moore  often 
totally  misreads  us,  but  we  do  not  want  to 
be  read,  we  want  to  read  ;  we  do  not  want 
to  be  understood,  we  want  to  understand. 
And  when  Mr.  Moore  adopts,  as  he  so  often 
does,  the  Sultan  attitude  towards  women, 
with  its  false  air  of  petting  and  protection, 
we  are  not  offended.  We  like,  even  those  of 
us  who  do  not  wear  it,  to  be  told  how  men 
are  subjugated  by  powder  and  paint.     The 

31 


GEORGE  MOORE 


more  hardworking  we  are,  the  more  we  love 
to  hear  of  those  women  whose  only  labour 
is  that  they  may  achieve  an  instant's  beauty. 
Yet  women  are  the  sincerest  creatures  and 
but  seldom  taken  in  even  by  those  false 
statements  of  life  that  they  find  so  extremely 
comforting. 

Mr.  Moore  once  said  that  his  brother 
Maurice  was  the  only  member  of  his  family 
who  knew  how  to  behave  as  a  gentleman. 
Well,  Mr.  Moore  is  an  amazingly  truthful 
x  person,  and  this  commentary  upon  himself 
is  illuminating  in  view  of  the  liberties  which 
in  his  later  books  he  has  taken  with  his 
friends.  He  has  never  had  any  private 
life  himself,  and  he  regards  as  eccentricity 
the  objection  his  friends  have  to  the  private 
lives  invented  for  them  by  him.  In  his 
essay  on  Corot,  Mr.  Moore  tells  how  once 
he  came  upon  the  old  man  painting  in  the 
woods.  After  admiring  his  work,  Mr.  Moore 
said  to  him,  "Master,  what  you  are  doing 
is  very  beautiful,  but  where  is  it  ?  '!  Corot 
flicked  his  brush  in  the  direction  of  a  clump 
of  trees  a  couple  of  hundred  yards  away 
and  said  "  There."  Corot  was  improvising 
from  a  dim  suggestion.  He  did  not  want  to 
be  too  close,  to  lose  grip  of  his  subject  in  a 
mass  of  details.  This  story  is  a  parable  of 
Mr.  Moore  and  his  friends.  He  did  not 
want  to  see  them  closely,  knowledge  of 
detail  would  have  interfered  with  his  pic- 

32 


GEORGE  MOORE 


ture.  How  important  it  was  to  him  not  to 
get  too  close  to  his  subject,  the  following 
story  illustrates  :  Last  summer  returning 
from  Kilteragh  in  Sir  Horace  Plunkett's  car, 
having  lunched  there  and  been  treated  as  an 
honoured  guest,  he  seemed  penetrated  by 
the  kindness  of  Sir  Horace.  He  said  to  me  : 
"  Why,  Plunkett  is  a  most  intelligent  man, 
he  has  a  real  intellect.  I  never  spoke  to 
him  before.  I  never  understood  '  iE's  ' 
belief  in  him.  '  M  '  was  right,  he  is  never 
wrong.  Why  does  Plunkett  treat  me  like 
this  after  the  way  I  wrote  about  him  ?  He 
must  be  a  good  man."  Then,  the  first 
generous  impulse  past,  he  recurred  to  what 
really  mattered — his  writing,  and  with  a  sly 
smile  said,  "  How  fortunate  it  was  I  wrote 
my  book  before  I  knew  him."  Bouvard 
and  Pecuchet  were  already  fixed  in  their 
places,  no  intimate  knowledge  had  come  in 
time  to  spoil  the  literary  effect.  As  I  write 
this  little  story  with  a  horrible  exactness  I 
cannot  help  feeling  what  an  admirable  gem 
of  fiction  it  might  have  become  in  the 
capable  hands  of  Mr.  Moore.  He  would  have 
got  out  of  it  the  whole  first  volume  of  a 
novel. 

Mr.  Moore  is  no  Rabelais,  his  Irish  nature 
forbids  him.  He  is  no  French  novelist  at 
home  in  his  sins.  I  once  was  present  at  a 
social  gathering  in  Dublin  which  tried  to 
imitate  what  we   have  grown  to  believe — 

c  33 


GEORGE  MOORE 


it  is  probably  fiction — was  the  life  of  the 
Latin  quarter  in  Paris.  There  was  just  one 
person  present  who  was  native  to  that  life 
and  at  home  in  it,  and  he  was  not  Irish. 
The  others  !  My  goodness,  how  funny  they 
were  !  Dear  things,  they  had  never  learned 
how  to  be  anything  but  good,  and  they 
couldn't  learn.  They  were  as  awkward  as 
dancing  bears.  Conscience  sat  on  them  like 
Sunday  clothes,  the  atmosphere  was  as 
gloomy  as  a  church  heavy  with  mea  culpas. 
They  drank  pitifully,  it  was  the  only  road 
they  knew  to  Verlaine.  There  may  have  been 
a  time  in  Ireland  when  your  young  blood 
could  carry  his  drink  "like  a  gentleman." 
Alas,  I  never  saw  it.  When  your  clever 
young  Irishman  rots  his  brains  with  drink, 
they  rot,  that  is  all,  and  the  decomposition 
is  a  horror  to  fly  from.  Perhaps  the  Latin 
races  can  sin  gracefully,  the  Irish  cannot. 
And  Mr.  Moore's  sinning  ?  He  cannot 
escape  from  his  birthright,  Lough  Cara  set 
her  seal  on  him,  "  islands  lying  in  misted 
water,  faint  as  dreams."  As  Silenus  he  is  a 
poor  thing.  His  leer  is  so  much  "  make-up," 
and  it  is  the  more  revolting  because  he  is 
naturally  sincere.  He  has  no  genius  for  the 
gross.  It  is  a  creed  with  him  not  to  be 
ashamed,  but  here  I  catch  him  tripping, 
for  he  is  ashamed  of  being  ashamed.  Shame 
would  become  him  well  who  has  so  griev- 
ously betrayed  himself.     When  he  speaks 

34 


GEORGE  MOORE 


in  "Memoirs  of  My  Dead  Life"  of  the 
shock  he  experienced  in  a  glimpse  of  his 
"ugly  old  face,"  I  wish  some  mirror  had  J 
showed  him  his  ugly  old  soul !  He  cannot, 
however,  entirely  obscure  his  natural  kind- 
ness. Many  women  must  have  found  him  a 
good  friend.  It  is  an  artifice  and  a  peculiarly 
irritating  one  that  makes  him  so  continually 
translate  his  kindly  human  feeling  into 
terms  consistent  with  his  perverse  literary 
theory. 


35 


VI 

Though  levity  is  justifiable  and  even  com- 
mendable when  one  deals  with  Mr.  Moore 
as  a  poet  or  a  painter,  for  one  does  not  take 
him  seriously  in  either  of  these  aspects,  it 
would  be  entirely  out  of  place  when  one 
comes  to  speak  of  Mr.  Moore  as  a  novelist. 
Personally — and  I  need  not  apologise  for 
personality  in  an  intentionally  personal  book 
about  a  very  personal  writer — all  Mr.  Moore's 
novels  are  very  distasteful  to  one  who  never 
feels  quite  comfortable  or  happy  when 
obliged  to  voyage  in  fiction  outside  the  safe , 
harbourage  of  "  The  Wide  Wide  World,"  or 
"  Mansfield  Park."  I  have  an  ingrained 
propriety  of  mind  that  makes  me  most  at 
home  in  a  novel  where  the  young  lady 
marries  the  Rector,  who  should,  if  possible, 
be  the  next  heir  to  a  baronetcy  ;  and  where 
all  the  characters  walk  daintily  in  the  guarded 
is  of  life.  But  I  have  been  warned 
against  the  error  of  confounding  my  likings 
with  my  judgment,  and  while  my  personal 
self  is  most  unhappy  with  the  Balzacs,  the 
Turgenieffs,  the  Flauberts,  the  Daudets,  the 
Hardys  and  the  Moores,  my  intellect  is 
stimulated    by    such    society.      Like    most 

36 


patl 


GEORGE  MOORE 


women,  I  do  not  live  in  my  intellect,  but 
I  derive  great  benefit  from  my  occasional 
visits  there,  and  when  there  and  in  the  seat 
of  judgment,  I  allow  no  personal  predilec- 
tion to  influence  an  intellectual  decision. 
My  intellect,  then,  having  examined  all  the 
evidence,  assigns  Mr.  Moore  his  just  place 
as  a  novelist.  "  Esther  Waters  "  and  "  The~f 
Mummer's  Wife"  are  masterpieces  of  the  A 
naturalistic  school.  With  a  more  varied 
mind  than  Hardy,  Moore  has  the  same  sub- 
human insight.  It  is  the  uncanny  and  in- 
stinctive underground  knowledge  of  the 
domestic  servant.  It  has  the  same  minute- 
ness, the  same  unemotional  completeness. 
Had  servants  an  intellectuality  commensur- 
ate with  this  instinct  what  terrors  we  should 
experience  !  But  luckily  for  us  they  have 
for  the  most  part  a  simplicity  and  warmth 
of  nature  which  turns  this  sinister  instinct 
into  an  engine  for  our  comfort.  While  Mr. 
Moore  in  his  "Ave,  Salve  and  Vale"  has 
turned  it  into  an  engine  for  the  discomfort 
of  his  friends,  in  his  other  novels  he  has 
used  it  with  great  skill  in  an  examination, 
pathologically  minute,  of  the  emotions.  The 
ordinary  novel  reader  is  very  like  the 
ordinary  theatre  goer,  both  desire  a  sort  of 
after-dinner  lounge  for  the  mind.  It  is 
most  distressing  to  such  persons  to  find 
themselves  in  a  dissecting  room  where 
humanity  is  laid  upon  the  table  and  that 

37 


GEORGE  MOORE 


interior  life  so  happily  hidden  from  the 
un-intellectual  man  is  exposed  in  all  its 
complicated  workings.  He  feels  it  to  be  an 
indecency,  an  outrage,  though  he  may  admit 
its  value.  Dear  ordinary  person,  I  am  entirely 
with  you  in  my  prepossessions  and  tastes  ! 

From  the  year  1883,  when  he  published 
"  A  Modern  Lover,"  till  to-day  when  he  is 
publishing  his  "  Brook  Kerith,"  Mr.  Moore 
has  been  incessantly  busy  writing.  Natur- 
ally a  lazy  man,  as  those  who  know  him 
best  assure  us,  he  has  compelled  himself 
to  arduous  mental  labour.  He  has  deserved 
well  of  his  art,  he  has  propitiated  it  by  the 
sacrifice  of  many  things  dear  to  the  ordinary 
man,  he  has  not  even  withheld  his  friends. 
He  has  written  unblushingly  of  many  lovers, 
but  his  art  has  been  his  one  love  all  his 
life,  and  he  has  been  to  her  the  most  faithful 
of  devotees,  and  he  has  had  his  reward. 
Three  of  his  novels  show  us  very  clearly 
what  this  reward  has  been.  /  In  "  The  Mum- 
mer's Wife"  Mr.  Moore  obtained  power,  in 
"  Esther  Waters  "  sureness,  and  in  "  Ave  " 
he  found  a  complete  expression  of  a  most 
vivid  and  original  personality .\ 

Mr.  Moore  in  his  "  Confessions  of  a  Young 
Man,"  published  in  1888,  tells  us  the  story 
of  his  journeying  from  Mayo  to  Mont- 
martre,  of  his  life  as  an  art  student  in  Paris, 
and  of  his  return  to  London  and  his  self- 
imposed  servitude  there  to  the  art  of  writing. 

38 


GEORGE  MOORE 


There  is  little  to  distinguish  his  story  from 
that  of  other  ardent  young  men  of  his  day 
or  of  ours,  except  the  determined  publicity 
he  gave  it.  I  remember  when  I  was  a  little 
schoolgirl  pulling  out  a  shaky  tooth  with  a 
determination  to  let  no  pain  deter  me, 
because  in  five  or  ten  minutes  I  should  be 
able  to  show  the  tooth  to  my  schoolmates 
and  boast  of  my  sufferings.  Mr.  Moore,, 
with  as  many  teeth  as  a  crocodile,  has 
pulled  them  all  out  in  his  "  Confessions  of  a 
Young  Man,"  and  hasn't  spared  us  a  single 
reminiscent  pang.  This  bad  boy  of  English 
literature  who  does  his  own  birching  so  per- 
sistently and  publicly  tells  us  of  his  selfish- 
ness, his  folly  and  perverseness  in  Paris, 
and  how  he  found  that  painting  was  un- 
attainable for  him,  and  how  he  had  the 
sense  to  drop  it  and  make  another  bid  for 
fame.  I  do  not  regret  his  Paris,  however, 
when  I  come  to  read  his  novels.  How  in- 
tolerable his  realism  would  have  been  on  an 
English  foundation.  If  an  Irish  writer 
must  travel,  then  I  think  the  long  way 
round  by  Paris  is  the  shortest  way  home  for 
him.  Synge  found  it  so,  and  James  Stephens 
is  travelling  that  way  also.  Paris  saved 
Mr.  Moore  from  the  English  idea  that  the 
novel  is  meant  merely  to  amuse.  In  the 
English  novels,  with  a  few  exceptions,  one 
finds  no  light,  no  air,  they  treat  of  love  as 
if  it  were  one  of  the  courses  at  dinner,  a 

39 


V' 


GEORGE  MOORE 


heavy  dinner.  Paris  also  may  have  saved 
Mr.  Moore  from  building  on  this  foundation 
because  it  influenced  him  in  his  ideas  about 
women.  However  narrow  his  realism,  how- 
ever obsessed  by  sex,  your  French  novelist 
does  not  seem  to  be  able  to  get  away  from 
the  conviction  that  woman  stands  for  beauty. 
His  belief  is  a  fugitive  gleam,  perhaps,  from 
some  old  pagan  memory,  flitting  here  and 
there  across  his  darkness. 

Moore  in  his  "  Mummer's  Wife  "  is  affected 
by  the  realists,  but  his  Irish  temperament 
saved  him  from  what  might  easily  have  de- 
generated into  a  catalogue  of  details  and  the 
use  of  the  observer's  notebook.  He  gradu- 
ally obtained  mastery  over  his  materials 
and  his  art  became  less  a  picture  of  life  and 
more  and  more  a  manifestation  of  his  own 
temperament.  In  "  The  Lake,"  written  in 
1905,  for  the  first  time  he  began  to  get  a 
mastery  of  his  style,  long  practice  had 
brought  him  to  the  point  where  he  deserved 
to  be  called  a  writer  as  distinct  from  a 
story-teller.  We  begin  more  and  more 
after  this  book  to  find  happy  turns  of  phrase 
such  as  that  which  delights  us  in  "  Ave," 
when  he  speaks  of  Yeats'  attempt  at  a  joke 
being  "  lost  in  the  folds  of  his  style."  "  The 
Lake ' '  was  written  in  Ireland.  It  seems  as  if  it 
was  a  true  instinct  that  drew  him  to  Ireland, 
his  incessant  labour  for  his  own  making  was 
not  in  vain,  his  best  work  was  done  here. 

40 


VII 


The  reviewer,  that  literary  agitator,  who 
could  not  live  at  all  but  for  the  strife  he 
stirs  up  about  writers,  will  say  that  my 
attempt  at  a  criticism  of  Mr.  Moore's  novels 
is  an  absurdity,  he  will  show  me  how  it 
ought  to  be  done.  Even  so,  that  is  his 
business.  I  am  attending  to  mine,  which  is 
to  provide  him  with  things  to  say.  The 
writers  will  be  on  my  side.  They  would 
surely  rather  that  their  books  should  be 
treated  as  living  persons,  first  of  all,  than 
that  I  should  show  sentence  by  sentence 
how  Mr.  Moore  or  another  learned  to  write 
them.  This  is  the  reason  I  provide  for  my- 
self for  choosing  some  of  the  most  living 
to  me  of  Mr.  Moore's  novels  and  showing 
the  effect  of  their  acquaintance  on  me, 
rather  than  writing  in  the  usual  manner  of 
the  reviewer  of  the  effect  of  my  acquaint- 
ance on  them.  Three  of  the  writers  who 
have  preceded  me  in  this  series  of  "  Irish- 
men of  To-Day "  have  approached  their 
task  somewhat  differently.  Yet  I  cannot 
help  feeling  that  Mr.  Darrell  Figgis,  who  so 
ostentatiously  presents  us  with  a  clue  to  the 
labyrinth  of  "  M"  is  lost  in  it  himself  and 

41 


GEORGE  MOORE 


can  never  lead  us  out.  Mr.  Hone,  one  of  the 
very  few  impartial  Irish  writers,  is  listless 
about  Mr.  Yeats,  his  book  has  no  more  blood 
in  it  than  a  balance  sheet.  There  is  blood  in 
Mr.  Ervine's  "Carson";  he  knows  nothing 
about  Sir  Edward  Carson,  of  course,  but 
his  teeth  are  firmly  fixed  in  the  calf  of 
someone's  leg,  all  the  time,  and  he  draws 
blood  without  a  doubt. 

Mr.  Moore  in  his  preface  to  "  Spring 
Days,"  published  in  1888,  says  that  some 
six  years  before  he  had  noticed  that  "  an 
artificial  and  decadent  society  was  repre- 
sented by  a  restricted  and  conventional 
literature  of  no  relation  with  the  moment 
of  which  it  chattered."  He  explains  that 
in  spite  of  the  great  difficulties  in  his  way 
he  had  written  "  A  Drama  in  Muslin  "  and 
"  A  Mere  Accident,"  "  scorning  all  facile 
success  and  walking  to  the  best  of  my 
strength  in  the  way  of  Art."  Mr.  Moore  has 
certainly  laboured  in  his  realism  in  "  Spring 
Days,"  and  alas  !  we  labour  in  it  too.  A 
human  being  will  die  who  is  obliged  to  re- 
breathe  the  air  he  exhales  and  no  other, 
and  these  exhalations  of  our  own  lives,  the 
realistic  novels,  are  heavy  with  death  to 
the  imagination.  Yet  one  cannot  but  ac- 
knowledge what  a  painstaking  and  faithful 
picture  "  Spring  Days  "  is  of  our  middle- 
yj  class  life,  where  no  wild  adventure  occurs, 
where   crises   come   towards   us   insidiously 

42 


v 


GEORGE  MOORE 


and  not  in  the  grand  manner  with  a  swoop 
of  wings.  The  nets  of  convention  are  about 
us,  character  develops  through  a  series  of 
little  pushes  this  way  and  that.  It  is  life, 
but  life  repeated  so  faithfully  that  it  asphyxi- 
ates. I  am  glad  Mr.  Moore  sloughed  his 
realism  as  he  went  on,  though  it  fits  in  with 
his  nature  that  he  should  have  revolted 
against  the  insincere  art  of  his  day.  It  is 
not  easy  for  us  now  to  realise  what  an  up- 
heaval these  early  realistic  novels  repre- 
sented, and  we  are  inclined  to  do  them  less 
than  justice.  Mr.  Moore  struggled  bravely 
through  the  surf  in  these,  they  developed 
his  muscle  as  a  writer,  and  through  them 
he  learned  to  handle  his  boat  "  Esther 
Waters  "  as  a  master  mariner.  \ 

I  read  "The  Mummer's  Wife"  when  I  \ 
lived  with  the  Yeats  in  Bedford  Park,  and 
chiefly,  with  feminine  perversity,  because 
W.  B.  Yeats  had  forbidden  his  sisters  to 
read  it.  I  gulped  guilty  pages  of  it  as  I 
went  to  bed  of  nights.  Its  merciless  probing  / 
into  life  intimidated  me.  I  shrank  from  it 
as  the  periwinkle  from  the  pin.  At  this 
distance  of  time  I  could  not  perhaps  give  a 
very  clear  account  of  the  story,  but  I  will 
agree  with  anybody  that  it  is  a  powerful 
novel ;  I  was  impaled  on  the  point  of  it,  and 
I  know.  I  have  not  the  courage  to  read  it 
again.  The  fat  actor  who  lures  away  the 
poor  little  woman  who  becomes  his  wife  lives 

43 


GEORGE  MOORE 


in  my  memory  as  one  of  the  most  real 
human  beings  in  English  fiction.  His  rela- 
tions with  the  woman  he  lured  away  and 
the  gradual  deterioration  of  her  character 
are  depicted  with  truth  so  merciless  that  the 
most  severe  moralist  could  have  added 
nothing  to  the  lesson  it  teaches.  I  under- 
stand that  the  book  is  regarded  as  immoral ; 
to  me  it  appeared  one  of  the  most  gloomy 
moralities  in  literature.  Mr.  Moore  is  a 
man  who  by  personal  preference  would  like 
all  love  tales  to  end  happily,  but  as  an  artist 
and  an  Irishman  he  could  not  be  senti- 
mental, and  he  degraded  the  runaway  wife 
as  if  he  had  learned  his  doctrine  of  retribu- 
tion in  the  plain  black  and  white  it  would 
have  been  taught  him  by  any  parish  priest 
in  Connaught. 

On  Mr.  Moore's  return  to  his  native  land, 
when  I  met  him  for  the  first  time  of  speech, 
remembering  those  tortured  readings  of 
"  The  Mummer's  Wife,"  as  nobody  was 
within  hearing  at  the  moment,  I  asked 
him,  with  the  ignorant  courage  of  my  Puri- 
tanism, why  he  wrote  such  horrible  books. 
He  answered  by  asking  me  had  I  read  any 
of  them.  I  faltered  "No" — for  I  was 
ashamed  to  confess  to  "  The  Mummer's 
Wife."  He  said  with  that  instant  surrender 
to  attack  so  characteristic  of  him  :  "I 
wrote  one  good  book,  'Esther  Waters.'  I 
will  get  you  a  copy  of  it."    He  went  out  of 

44 


GEORGE  MOORE 


the  Homestead  office  and  returned  shortly 
with  a  sixpenny  copy  of  "Esther  Waters,'/7 
in  which  he  wrote  his  name  at  my  request. 
I  read  the  book,  and  my  respect  for  him 
grew  great,  for  I  thought  I  discovered  in  it 
not  only  a  brain  but  a  heart,  and  in  spite 
of  an  extraordinary  amount  of  evidence 
since  produced  to  me  of  Mr.  Moore's  want 
of  heart,  I  cannot  rid  myself  of  the  con- 
viction I  felt  when  I  read  that  book.  To 
this  eager,  inquisitive  being  who  busied 
himself  so  untiringly  about  life,  and  who 
has  lived  a  vicarious  life  of  so  much  intensity 
in  the  creatures  of  his  imagination,  I  could 
almost  say  when  I  follow  him  with  heart- 
ache through  the  story  of  Esther's  suffer- 
ings, told  with  a  most  moving  sympathy  : 
"  For  this  thy  sins  be  forgiven  thee,"  as 
the  man  in  the  audience  at  Fishamble  Street 
theatre  cried  to  the  sinful  woman  who  sang 
Handel's  angel  music  at  the  first  perform- 
ance of  the  "  Messiah." 

"  Esther  Waters  "  is  the  story  of  a  servant 
girl,  and  in  that  lowly  story  Mr.  Moore  has 
expressed  the  life  of  the  lowly  with  a  most 
finished  art  and  with  real  tenderness.  In 
"  The  Mummer's  Wife  "  he  shows  us  how 
fiercely  life  treats  the  mere  wisp  of  woman- 
hood, without  will,  without  character,  who 
is  flung  into  its  cruel  currents — the  fragility 
that  is  her  charm  making  her  ruin  the  more 
complete  and  the  more  tragic.     In  Esther 

45 


GEORGE  MOORE 


Waters  we  have  a  woman  refined,  delicate, 
but  in  whom  will  and  affection  are  so  strong 
that  her  character  begins  to  grow  from  the 
very  moment  when  its  destruction  seemed 
inevitable.  Mr.  Moore  has  an  almost  un- 
canny insight  into  a  woman's  being.  In 
"  The  Mummer's  Wife  "  his  analysis  of  the 
emotions  is  so  minute  that  one's  sensibilities 
are  excited  to  a  point  that  is  quite  painful. 
In  "  Esther  Waters  "  it  is  one's  heart  that 
is  touched.  The  following  extract  from  the 
preface  to  the  cheap  edition  of  the  book 
issued  in  1899  shows  us  a  Moore  whom 
perhaps  many  of  his  readers  will  not  recog- 
nise and  whose  acquaintance,  I  imagine,  Mr. 
Moore  himself  made  with  some  surprise.  He 
says  :  "  It  was  very  generally  assumed  that 
its  (4  Esther  Waters'  ')  object  was  to  agitate 
for  a  law  to  prevent  betting  rather  than  to 
exhibit  the  beauty  of  the  simple  heart  and 
to  inculcate  a  love  of  goodness.  The  teach- 
ing of  '  Esther  Waters  '  is  as  non-combative 
as  the  Beatitudes.  Betting  may  be  an  evil, 
but  what  is  evil  is  always  uncertain,  whereas 
there  can  be  no  question  that  to  refrain  from 
judging  others,  from  despising  the  poor  in 
spirit  and  those  who  do  not  possess  the 
wealth  of  the  world  is  certain  virtue.  That 
all  things  that  live  are  to  be  pitied  is  the 
lesson  that  I  learn  from  reading  my  book, 
and  that  others  may  learn  as  much  is  my 
hope."     It  was  the  first  time  in  literature 

46 


GEORGE  MOORE 


that  the  life  of  a  servant  girl  was  treated 
with  the  sincerity  of  an  artist.  Mr.  Moore 
had  none  of  the  desire  to  exhibit  his  Esther 
in  the  kind  of  picturesque  way  Dickens  ex- 
hibits his  characters.  We  can  imagine 
Dickens,  in  spite  of  his  humanity,  reflecting  : 
"  How  amusing  these  people  are."  Mr. 
Moore  seems  to  say  rather  :  "  How  alike 
everywhere  is  the  human  heart."  He  has 
no  bias,  he  never  patronises  his  servant.  He 
does  not  look  for  the  picturesque,  but  only 
traces  the  love  of  a  mother  for  her  child 
with  a  sincerity  which,  as  I  said  before,  was 
probably  amazing  to  himself. 

It  is  a  curious  matter  this  of  the  novelist ; 
if  one  examined  into  it  one  would  wander 
in  dark  labyrinths.  If  the  novelist  lives  in 
his  characters,  who  control  him  for  the 
moment  as  the  medium's  body  is  controlled, 
and  he  receives  vision  through  them  and 
realises  through  them  the  purposes  of  life, 
will  this  imaginative  life  count  anything  to 
him  who  outside  his  writings — for  all  record 
we  have  of  him — has  just  been  a  digestion 
and  a  breathing  apparatus,  a  life  so  vicarious, 
that  the  wittiest  woman  in  Dublin  said  of 
him  :  "  Some  men  kiss  and  tell,  Mr.  Moore 
tells  but  doesn't  kiss."  Will  there  be  any- 
thing chalked  up  to  his  credit  in  the  tavern 
of  life  when  he  comes  to  drink  again  ?  I 
leave  it  to  you,  my  readers,  I  am  no  meta- 
physician.   Here  is  a  man,  Moore,  who  has 

47 


GEORGE  MOORE 


to  many  minds  profaned  his  home,  his 
parents,  his  most  sacred  ties,  to  whom 
writing  is  father,  mother,  home,  lover, 
friend,  life  itself,  who  when  he  ceases  to 
write  will  cease  to  live  and  will  crumple  up 
shapeless,  nameless,  mortal.  What  is  there 
to  him — any  way — more  than  to  a  miner 
who  sweats  chunks  out  of  the  earth,  who 
marries  and  leaves  hearty  children  to  per- 
petuate mining  and  the  Iron  Age  of  Man  ? 

In  the  year  following  the  publication  of 
"  Esther  Waters "  Mr.  Moore  published 
"  Celibates."  It  is  written  with  great  con- 
fidence and  ease  and  shows  Mr.  Moore 
getting  a  grip  of  himself  and  his  powers  and 
possibilities  as  a  writer.  The  morbid  states 
it  deals  with  are  treated  with  none  of  the 
waywardness  we  are  inclined  to  associate 
with  Mr.  Moore.  The  adventurer  in  life 
comes  upon  strange  discoveries,  and  the 
novelist  must  be  in  a  sense  a  pathologist  of 
the  emotions.  It  is  when  he  goes  beyond 
this  and  becomes  the  pathologist  pure  and 
simple  that  he  nauseates  us.  Mr.  Moore  is 
too  good  an  artist  to  make  this  mistake. 
He  faces  life  as  squarely  as  any  writer  I 
know,  but  one  is  in  no  danger  of  mistaking 
a  page  in  any  of  his  novels  for  a  page  in  a 
medical  journal ;  a  confusion  of  mind  that 
one  sometimes  experiences  in  reading  a 
modern  novel.  Mr.  Moore's  discoveries  in 
life  are  not  for  the  medical  museum,  but  for 

48 


GEORGE  MOORE 


the  picture  gallery.  Mildred  Lawson  is  a 
very  clever  study  of  a  feminine  George 
Moore  —  the  same  temperament  with  a 
woman's  instinctive  intellectuality,  self-con- 
scious but  not  profoundly  so.  John  Norton 
is  the  voyager  who  hugs  the  shores  of  life ; 
who  has  no  confidence  in  his  own  nature  ; 
who  is  austere  rather  from  timidity  of 
temperament  than  from  any  moral  self- 
consciousness.  Mr.  Moore  has  analysed  him 
very  ably.  Agnes  Lahens  and  Kitty  Hare 
are  snowflakes  —  exquisite,  unsubstantial, 
reaching  earth  only  to  die. 

"  Celibates  "  is  serious  work,  yet  I  find 
in  it  something  that  alienates.  It  opens  up 
fields  of  speculation,  and  I  delight  in  specula- 
tion where  the  mind  takes  wing,  but  such 
speculations  as  are  here  do  not  liberate  the 
mind,  they  rather  lead  it  into  a  blind  alley. 
I  am  always  inclined  to  take  a  book  as  a 
living  creature,  make  friends  with  it  or 
leave  it  alone  as  it  attracts  or  repels.  "  Celi- 
bates "  is  one  of  Mr.  Moore's  books  that  I 
should  leave  alone. 

"  Memoirs  of  My  Dead  Life  "  is  a  book 
that  attracts,  and  though  there  is  much  of 
the  dead  life  resurrected  in  it  that  Mr. 
Moore  would  have  done  well  to  leave  in 
its  grave, \|or  it  has  seen  corruption  and  is 
unfit  to  be  above  ground -vand  much  of  it 
that  should  never  have  been  born — there 
are  some  beautiful  things  in  the  book. 
d  49 


GEORGE  MOORE 


"  Spring  in  London,"  "  Marie  Pellegrin," 
"  A  Remembrance,"  "  A  Waitress,"  "  Re- 
surgam,"  should  not  die.  This  is  the  Mr. 
Moore  whom  we  know  in  "  Esther  Waters," 
who  reveals  himself  partially  in  "  The  Lake," 
who  is  continually  with  us  in  "  The  Untilled 
Field,"  and  of  whom  we  have  fitful  glimpses 
in  the  waywardness  of  "Ave,  Salve  and 
Vale."  The  Moore  who  is  neither  a  mock 
satyr,  nor  a  nasty  little  schoolboy,  but  a 
thinker  and  a  warm-hearted  human  being. 
This  book  is  Mr.  Moore's  second  essay  in 
confessions,  and  while  it  is  an  advance  on 
"  The  Confessions  of  a  Young  Man,"  showing 
greater  power  of  selection  and  expression 
and  less  perversity  and  vanity — for  life  had 
no  doubt  been  sitting  heavily  on  Mr.  Moore's 
head  since  those  early  days — it  has  not  the 
fine  originality,  the  wit  and  skill  and  malice 
and  the  entire  indiscretion  of  the  great 
Trilogy.  Mr.  Moore,  who  desires  to  pose 
before  the  world  as  the  passionate  lover,  is 
quite  unconvincing  in  this  part.  He  is  really 
interested  Jn  affection,  and  I  think  there  are 
few  writers  who  approach  this  subject  with 
greater  delicacy  or  fuller  comprehension. 
The  element  of  fantasy  with  which  nature 
has  endowed  Mr.  Moore  began  to  appear  for 
the  first  time  in  "  Memoirs  of  My  Dead 
Life,"  breaking  out  there  as  the  heather 
does  in  a  reclaimed  field.  How  easy  it 
would   have   been   for   this   versatile   artist 

50 


GEORGE  MOORE 


to  have  been  a  writer  of  fantasies  rather 
than  a  realist  will  appear  from  the  following 
passage  in  "Resurgam."  Perhaps  he  would 
have  been  a  much  greater  writer  if  he  could 
have  mingled  both  moods  together.  We 
sigh  for  a  little  fantasy  when  we  read  the 
realistic  novels,  and  Mr.  Moore  himself  must 
have  sighed  for  it  also,  for  he  finally  broke 
away  from  naturalism  and  achieved  a  style 
in  which  his  whole  being  could  be  reflected. 
He  says  in  "  Resurgam  "  :  "  Twenty  priests 
had  been  engaged  to  sing  a  Mass,  and  whilst 
they  chanted,  my  mind  continued  to  roam, 
seeking  the  unattainable,  seeking  that  which 
Raminese  had  been  unable  to  find.  Unex- 
pectedly, at  the  very  moment  when  the 
priest  began  to  intone  the  Pater  Noster,  I 
thought  of  the  deep  sea  as  the  only  clean 
and  holy  receptacle  for  the  vase  containing 
my  ashes.  If  it  were  dropped  where  the 
sea  is  deepest,  it  would  not  reach  the  bottom, 
but  would  hang  suspended  in  dark  moveless 
depths  where  only  a  few  fishes  range,  in  a 
cool,  deep  grave  '  made  without  hands,  in 
a  world  without  stain,'  surrounded  by  a 
lovely  revel  of  Bacchanals,  youths  and 
maidens,  and  wild  creatures  from  the  woods, 
man  in  his  primitive  animality.  But  nothing 
lasts  for  ever.  In  some  millions  of  years 
the  sea  will  begin  to  wither,  and  the  vase 
containing  me  will  sink.  My  hope  is  that  it 
will  sink  down  to  some  secure  foundation 

51 


GEORGE  MOORE 


of  rocks,  to  stand  in  the  airless  and  waterless 
desert  that  the  earth  will  then  be.  Raminese 
failed,  but  I  shall  succeed.  Surrounded  by- 
dancing  youths  and  maidens,  my  tomb  shall 
stand  on  a  high  rock  in  the  solitude  of  the 
extinct  sea  of  an  extinct  planet.  Millions  of 
years  will  pass  away,  and  the  earth,  after 
having  lain  dead  for  a  long  winter,  as  it 
does  now  for  a  few  weeks  under  frost  and 
snow,  will,  with  all  other  revolving  planets, 
become  absorbed  in  the  sun,  and  the  sun 
itself  will  become  absorbed  in  greater  suns, 
Sirius  and  his  like.  In  matters  of  grave 
moment,  millions  of  years  are  but  seconds  ; 
billions  convey  very  little  to  our  minds. 
At  the  end  of,  let  us  say,  some  billion  years 
the  ultimate  moment  towards  which  every- 
thing from  the  beginning  has  been  moving 
will  be  reached  ;  and  from  that  moment 
the  tide  will  begin  to  flow  out  again,  and  the 
eternal  dispersal  of  things  will  begin  again  ; 
suns  will  be  scattered  abroad,  and  in  tre- 
mendous sunquakes  planets  will  be  thrown 
off  ;  in  loud  earthquakes  these  planets  will 
throw  off  moons.  Millions  of  years  will  pass 
away,  the  earth  will  become  cool,  and  out 
of  the  primal  mud  life  will  begin  again  in 
the  shape  of  plants,  then  of  fish,  and  then 
of  animals.  It  is  like  madness,  but  is  it 
madder  than  Christian  doctrine  ?  And  I 
believe  that,  billions  of  years  hence,  I  shall 
be  sitting  in  the  same  room  as  I  sit  now, 

52 


GEORGE  MOORE 


writing  the  same  lines  as  I  am  now  writing  : 
I  believe  that  again,  a  few  years  later,  my 
ashes  will  swing  in  the  moveless  and  silent 
depths  of  the  Pacific  ocean,  and  that  the 
same  figures,  the  same  nymphs  and  the  same 
fauns  will  dance  around  me  again." 

I  cannot  help  feeling  that  in  "  Evelyn 
Innes,"  published  in  1898,  Mr.  Moore  was 
at  a  stagnant  period  in  his  development  as 
a  writer.  Perhaps  he  was  ready  for  that 
troubling  of  the  waters  that  came  to  him 
in  the  call  to  Ireland  a  little  later.  There  is 
everything  in  "  Evelyn  Innes  "  to  make  it 
a  fine  novel ;  an  eternal  idea  — the  struggle 
of  the  spirit  and  the  flesh — but  the  success 
does  not  come  off.  This  is,  I  think,  because 
Mr.  Moore,  while  very  fully  assured  about 
the  flesh,  is  diffident  about  the  spirit,  and 
leaves  us  in  the  end  undecided  as  to  what  in 
Evelyn  is  fighting  the  affection  of  Sir  Owen 
Asher,  an  affection  which  seems  to  us  a 
more  spiritual  thing  than  the  supposed 
spiritual  influence  into  which  she  is  drawn. 
Mr.  Moore  is  not  convincing  in  his  Cardinal,'" 
his  Eminence  does  not  satisfy  us  any  more 
than  he  does  Mr.  Moore,  and  above  all  he  \ 
does  not  satisfy  Evelyn.  His  failure  is  Mr. 
Moore's  own  failure,  lack  of  spirituality. 
Nevertheless  "  Evelyn  Innes  "  will  be  for 
many  readers  Mr.  Moore's  most  popular 
piece  of  work,  and  I  hardly  like  to  suggest  ,. 
that    this    may    be    because    it    has    some 

53 


GEORGE  MOORE 


touches  which  show  Mr.  Moore  to  have  a 
sneaking  regard  for  Ouida.  I  am  not  above 
this  feeling  myself.  Is  it  not  a  little  reminis- 
cent of  Ouida  when  Sir  Owen  Asher  leads 
Evelyn  through  his  hall  on  the  evening  of 
their  flight  to  Paris  ?  "  Crossing  the  tessel- 
lated pavement  through  all  the  footmen, 
the  majestic  butler  there  solemn  as  an  idol," 
"  Owen  bends  over  a  marble  table  to  scribble 
a  note."  Yes,  and  in  Ouida's  hands  the  pen 
would  have  been  of  gold  with  a  handle  of 
porphyry.  I  believe  Owen  Asher  is  the  arche- 
type on  which  Mr.  Moore  had  fain  fashioned 
himself.  For  his  secondary  hero  Ulick 
Deane,  he  chose  Mr.  Yeats  first,  then  tried 
to  fit  "iE"  into  the  part;  afterwards  re- 
jecting both  of  these,  he  fixed  on  a  hero  who 
to  our  great  sorrow  was  unknown  to  us  in 
Dublin.  The  resemblance  of  Sir  Owen  Asher 
to  Mr.  Moore  is  very  strong  when  in  the 
scene  where  Owen  learns  that  Evelyn  has 
finally  forsaken  him  for  the  Church,  he  roars 
and  yells  in  agony  in  the  presence  of  Ulick 
Deane  and  Merat  the  maid.  I  think,  accord- 
ing to  a  Dublin  legend,  Mr.  Moore  behaved 
in  much  the  same  way  when  his  cook  spoiled 
an  omelette  ! 

All  the  same,  I  am  touched  by  "Evelyn 
Innes,"  and  I  think  all  that  is  obscure  in 
Mr.  Moore's  design  in  writing  it  explains 
itself  in  the  last  few  pages  of  its  companion 
book  "  Sister  Teresa."     Mr.  Moore  writes  a 

54 


GEORGE  MOORE 


moving  preface  to  the  second  edition  of 
"  Sister  Teresa,"  and  in  the  story  of  the 
unveiling  of  Frenhofer's  picture,  "  confused 
colour  and  incoherent  form,  and  in  one 
corner  a  delicious  foot,  a  living  foot  escaped 
by  a  miracle  from  a  slow  progressive  de- 
struction," does  Mr.  Moore  refer  to  those 
last  few  pages  ?  I  find  it  so,  and  the  two 
books  gather  a  meaning  for  me  in  that  scene 
when  Evelyn  and  Sir  Owen  meet  in  the 
garden  where  the  nightingales  answer  one 
another.  "  Mute  in  the  midst  of  that  im- 
mortal symphony  about  them" — a  scene 
that  holds  the  nearest  approach  to  spiritu- 
ality in  any  of  Mr.  Moore's  novels.  What 
woman  will  not  be  touched  by  a  novel 
where,  as  Mr.  Moore  says,  "  love  is  the 
only  motive  "  ?  "A  love  story,  the  first 
written  in  English  for  three  hundred  years." 
There  is  a  great  deal  of  what  I  have  called 
the  millinery  and  confectionery  of  love,  no 
doubt,  but  while  this  is  a  necessity  to  Mr. 
Moore  to  supply  his  lack  of  passion,  out  of  it 
emerges  affection,  that  quality  in  which,  as 
I  noticed  before,  Mr.  Moore  is  really  inter- 
ested, and  which  reaches  us  in  these  two 
books  through  all  their  wearisome  detail. 

Mr.  Moore  republished  last  year  his 
"  Drama  in  Muslin "  under  the  name  of 
"Muslin"  and  fitted  it  with  a  preface — a 
Georgian  preface  to  an  early  Victorian  novel. 
It  is  a  most  unsuitable  preface,  but  it  is  in 

55 


GEORGE  MOORE 


his  later  and  better  manner,  the  manner  of 
"  Ave."  He  threatens  to  become  an  eminent 
prefacer,  an  alarming  threat.  He  has  to 
some  extent  rewritten  the  book,  and  this 
makes  it  interesting  to  the  student  of  his 
style.  He  can  note  pretty  closely  the  com- 
mentary of  the  elderly  George  the  stylist 
on  the  youthful  George  the  story-teller. 

Years  ago  in  the  west  of  Ireland,  I  was 
present  at  a  prize-giving  in  a  convent  that  I 
believe  has  some  credit  there  as  a  place  of 
education  for  girls.  The  Catholic  Bishop 
of  the  diocese  presided,  and  it  was  to  me  as 
if  the  solid  ground  had  fissured  beneath  my 
feet  revealing  an  underworld  entirely  un- 
suspected. In  the  narrow  pride  of  my 
Ascendancy  I  had  never  dreamed  of  a 
Catholic  Ireland  that  had  its  own  presiding 
lawn  sleeves,  its  own  yards  of  white  muslin 
billowing  in  restless  rows,  representing  money 
that  could  be  paid  and  was  paid  for  teaching 
in  French  and  the  piano  and  the  violin,  all 
the  very  same  trappings  of  education  that  I 
believed  only  to  exist  among  the  Ascendancy 
under  whose  shadow  I  was  nurtured.  And 
that  these  white  forms  represented  young 
ladies  who,  when  they  dispersed  from  the 
convent,  would  each  adorn  a  real  home  and 
a  society  that  really  existed  behind  the 
barriers  of  the  R.M.,  the  D.I.,  the  Rector, 
the  bankers  and  the  county  gentry ;  a 
society   with   its   grades    and    its   codes   of 

56 


GEORGE  MOORE 


manners  as  strict  as  any  I  had  known, 
this  was  surely  an  amazing  thing.  The 
whole  solid  ground  of  my  experience  trem- 
bled. How  was  it  I  had  never  glimpsed 
these  muslin  forms  behind  my  Ascendancy 
barriers,  never  realised  this  excellent  imita- 
tion of  Society  as  I  knew  it  ?  Almost  the 
same  it  seemed  to  be,  a  redder  hand  here  and 
there  perhaps,  a  heavier  foot,  but  social  and 
in  the  full  swing  of  life  ?  The  walled  garden 
of  the  Ascendancy  was  no  more  to  me  a 
world,  but  a  walled  garden,  and  I  another 
Eve,  curious  as  the  first.  My  inquisition 
was  rewarded  when  I  read  "  The  Drama  in 
Muslin."  I  had  found  my  convent.  It  was 
on  English  soil  no  doubt,  but  its  dispersed 
pupils  went  home  to  Ireland,  and  save  that 
one  takes  for  granted  that  they  were  not 
behind  any  social  barriers  there,  as  the 
muslin-frocked  maidens  of  my  earlier  know- 
ledge, how  little  different  are  they  !  Always 
apart,  preserving  their  hereditary  charac- 
teristics as  surely  as  the  Jews.  Mr.  Moore's 
muslin  girls  play  their  parts  in  a  drama 
of  the  Zenana,  so  thick  is  the  purdah  separ- 
ating them  from  the  strong  boot  and  short 
skirt  life  in  the  south-western  counties  as 
my  youth  knew  it  in  a  decade  or  so  after 
Mr.  Moore. 

Some  decades  have  passed  since  then,  with 
a  breaking  down  of  many  barriers.  I  wonder 
if  this  generation  of  Protestants  in  the  Irish 

57 


GEORGE  MOORE 


provinces  realises  at  all  the  social  aloofness 
of  the  two  religions  in  the  days  I  write  of, 
when  in  the  west  of  Ireland  a  Catholic 
nurse  might  indeed  hold  a  Protestant  infant 
in  her  arms  at  the  Protestant  baptismal 
font,  and  hear  our  heresies  unhindered,  but 
a  Protestant  vestry  could  prevent  the  burial 
of  a  Catholic  wife  in  the  same  grave  as  her 
Protestant  husband,  lest  it  might  mar  the 
perfection  of  a  Protestant  resurrection.  The 
tables  have  turned  on  us  now  and  we  cannot 
complain,  but  are  the  barriers  breaking 
down,  is  the  fissure  narrowing  ? 

I  have  lingered  willingly  over  "  Muslin," 
though  to  the  critic  my  choice  of  this  novel 
may  seem  an  unintelligible  fancy.  I  know 
my  literary  armour  is  not  proof  against 
attack,  any  bow  drawn  at  a  venture  might 
hit  me,  so  I  fight  my  corner  in  my  own  way, 
following  no  rules  but  planting  a  blow 
wherever  I  can.  "Muslin"  is  an  Irish  story, 
and  I  am  writing  of  a  man  who  is  more 
characteristic  of  his  nation  than  a  Carson 
or  a  Redmond.  In  my  writing  I  am  like 
the  child  who  suffers  the  meat  course,  but 
saves  his  appetite  for  the  pudding.  Moore 
the  Irishman,  Moore  as  we  knew  him  in 
Dublin,  is  my  pudding. 


58 


VIII 

Mr.  Moore  is  an  Irishman.  He  was  born 
in  Mayo,  where  his  family  had  been  settled 
for  several  generations.  He  himself  claims 
an  English  origin,  but  like  Peter  the  Galilean, 
who,  in  spite  of  his  accent,  would  have 
denied  his  province,  the  accent  of  Mr. 
Moore's  mind  bewray eth  him.  And  if  one 
had  no  other  evidence  of  his  Irish  origin, 
"  Parnell  and  his  Island,"  written  with  all 
the  malignity  of  kinship,  would  have  re- 
vealed it. 

Everyone  who  writes  about  Ireland  takes 
it  for  granted  that  it  is  a  sick  country,  and 
each  writer  has  his  nostrum.  I  wonder  are 
we  really  as  sick  as  the  doctors  say,  and 
shall  I  also  in  a  page  or  so  be  advertising 
my  potion  ?  Opinions  are  divided  also  as 
to  the  identity  of  the  patient,  and  the  ques- 
tion "  What  is  an  Irishman  ?  "  causes  almost 
as  much  concern  as  a  lately  debated  problem 
"  What  is  whiskey  ?  "  Ireland  is  full  of 
people  all  so  busied  in  being  Catholics  and 
Protestants  and  Unionists  and  Nationalists 
that  they  have  no  time  to  betray  any  Irish 
character.  Mr.  Moore  resisted  the  tempta- 
tion common  to  every  Irishman  to  obliterate 

59 


GEORGE  MOORE 


himself  in  a  movement,  consequently  his 
Irish  character  had  a  chance  to  emerge. 
But  on  those  who  have  effaced  their  identity 
in  religious  or  party  nomenclature  the  ques- 
tion as  to  who  is  the  real  Irishman  must 
continually  obtrude  itself.  Can  it  be  decided 
by  religion,  politics,  lineage  or  name  ?  The 
little  weeklies  are  often  very  fierce;  mostly 
Catholic  and  Nationalist,  it  seems  to  me 
they  would  have  these  terms  interchange- 
able ;  to  be  Irish,  they  suggest  one  must  be 
both.  Hence  the  Nationalist  and  Catholic 
descendants  of  Cromwell's  troopers  with 
names  unmistakably  Saxon  are  accounted 
Irish,  while  such  as  I,  a  Protestant,  having 
names  stiff  with  Gaeldom  in  every  genera- 
tion of  my  family,  have  our  claim  to  Ireland 
disallowed.  Yet  it  is  an  old  truism  that  for 
leaders  Irish  Nationality  had  Emmet,  Tone, 
Fitzgerald,  Mitchell,  Davis,  Parnell,  all  Pro- 
testants. 

In  Ireland  a  man's  religion  is  not  a  per- 
sonal and  private  matter,  as  in  other  coun- 
tries it  may  be  ;  it  is  a  public  business,  and 
the  getting  or  not  getting  a  job  is  involved 
in  it.  This  being  so,  perhaps  one  should  not 
drop  one's  eyes  timidly  when  the  subject 
of  religion  appears,  but  confront  it  boldly 
and  examine  into  it.  Boldly  then  I  speak 
as  a  Protestant,  and  my  Catholic  friends 
shall  hear  a  stiff -kneed  Protestant  confess. 
Irish  Protestants  have  two  inheritances :  one 

60 


GEORGE  MOORE 


is  Foxe's  "  Book  of  Martyrs,"  the  other  is 
the  history  of  their  country.  One  tells  of 
martyrdoms  to  Rome,  the  other  of  martyr- 
doms to  England  :  the  result  being,  in 
minds  inclined  to  justice,  a  very  cordial  bias 
against  both  powers.  The  hounds  of  time 
had  left  us  very  little  of  Foxe  but  his  brush ; 
but  England  is  ever  with  us,  and  those 
Protestants  in  Ireland  who  did  not  hate 
her  for  her  treatment  of  their  Gaelic  ances- 
tors were  beginning  to  cultivate  a  very 
pretty  exasperation  with  her  treatment  of 
themselves.  One  is  often  inclined  to  credit 
England  with  more  brains  than  she  possesses, 
and  we  may  be  wrong  who  imagine  her 
policy  is  always  to  divide  us  in  Ireland.  She 
has  sold  this  country  so  very  often  that  we 
are  either  obliged  to  consider  her  diabolically 
clever  or  ourselves  idiotically  stupid,  and 
of  course  the  latter  idea  is  a  distasteful  one. 
It  was  an  old  but  always  pleasant  discovery 
to  England  that  bishops  are  as  a  body 
pretty  sure  to  be  on  the  side  of  stability 
and  safety  and  against  violence,  and  in  ruling 
Ireland  through  the  Catholic  bishops  she 
secured  safety  from  agrarian  crime ;  but  the 
fostering  of  a  New  Ascendancy  brought 
about  Hibernianism  as  the  fostering  of  the 
Old  brought  Orangeism,  and  then  came  the 
Insurance  Act,  giving  such  a  fillip  to  the 
Catholic  Orangeman  that  the  Protestant 
Orangeman    who    had    become   sleepy   and 

61 


GEORGE  MOORE 


indifferent  began  to  feel  stirrings  of  life 
again.  The  revival  of  his  old  sectarian 
doctrines  in  a  Catholic  translation  brought 
the  Orangeman  to  his  feet.  The  sons  of 
William  rose,  and  while  Joe  Devlin,  the 
Captain  of  the  Hibernian  team,  kicked  Ire- 
land back  one  hundred  years,  Edward  Carson, 
the  Protestant  Devlin,  not  to  be  outdone, 
with  his  Orangeman  kicked  her  back  a  little 
further.  And  so  it  came  to  pass  that  the 
outbreak  of  a  European  war  found  one  por- 
tion of  Ireland  organised,  armed  and  drilled, 
and  the  other  portion  beginning  to  do  like- 
wise, and  I  for  one  can  never  make  out 
whether  this  state  of  things  was  due  to  the 
Act  of  God  or  the  King's  enemies  or  to  his 
friends  the  English  Junkers  who  wanted 
recruits  out  of  Ireland. 

Is  it  any  wonder  that  the  inhabitant  of  a 
country  such  as  ours,  where  so  many  creeds 
and  parties  clamour  for  a  man's  soul,  cannot 
resist  the  temptation  offered  him  of  a  com- 
fortable pigeonhole  retreat  for  it  where  it 
need  never  agitate  him  again  ?  A  country 
where  it  is  more  convenient  to  be  anything 
rather  than  an  Irishman.  There  are  just 
two  or  three  persons  in  Ireland  who  walk 
about  freely  unclaimed  by  any  Shibboleth, 
and  the  tenants  of  the  pigeonholes  peer  at 
them,  some  in  admiration,  some  in  fear, 
some  in  dislike. 

When  Mr.  Moore  came  over  to  Ireland  at 


%■ 


62 


GEORGE  MOORE 


the  time  of  the  Boer  War  he  was  perhaps 
obeying  his  natural  instinct  as  an  Irishman : 
he  was  seeking  his  pigeonhole,  and  it  is  a 
proof  of  his  strong  individualism  that  in 
spite  of  the  agonising  desire  to  retreat  there 
that  he  describes  so  graphically  in  "  Ave," 
he  resisted  the  temptation.  Ten  years  of 
Ireland  couldn't  fetter  him.  Neither  the 
Gaelic  League,  the  Nationalists,  the  Catholics 
or  the  Protestants  could  detain  this  slippery 
customer,  and  he  left  Ireland  with  a  gibe 
for  them  all,  sparing  only  those  amongst  his 
friends  whose  independence  of  mind  and 
indifference  to  his  opinion  perhaps  pro- 
tected them  —  "  iE,"  John  Eglinton,  an  ~ 
Oliver  Gogarty. 

It  is  very  entertaining  to  read  in  "Ave" 
Mr.  Moore's  elaborate  staging  of  his  Irish 
career.  It  is  not  unusual  for  a  man  to  see 
himself  dramatically,  but  it  is  not  given  to 
every  man  to  plan  out  a  moving  scenario 
for  his  life  and  then  to  make  his  actions 
fit  it.  I  cannot  help  suspecting  that  Mr. 
Moore  may  have  sketched  out  his  "  Ave, 
Salve  and  Vale  "  before  ever  he  set  foot  in 
Dublin,  and  when  he  leaped  upon  the  stage 
here  all  was  prepared  to  his  own  order. 
But  Mr.  Moore,  though  a  clever  Irishman, 
was  not,  like  so  many  others  of  his  clever 
countrymen,  clever  enough  to  keep  out  of 
Ireland. 

We  in  Ireland  are  gifted  beyond  most 
63 


r 


GEORGE  MOORE 


peoples  with  a  talent  for  acting,  and  in 
Dublin  especially,  while  scorning  culture, 
which  indeed  we  have  not  got,  we  are  pos- 
sessed of  a  most  futile  and  diverting  clever- 
ness. Mr.  Moore's  entrance  on  the  stage  in 
Dublin  was  marred  by  an  audience  having 
as  much  dramatic  talent  as  he  himself,  and 
each  so  full  of  admiration  for  his  own 
exercise  of  it  that  he  had  only  a  fierce 
criticism  and  no  appreciation  to  give  a 
rival  player.  We  Irish  are  very  much 
aware  of  our  art  as  actors,  wc  seldom  lose 
ourselves  in  it,  but  Mr.  Moore's  dramatic 
concern  with  himself  is  so  much  inwoven  in 
his  nature  that  he  can  only  be  really  himself 
in  the  various  poses  he  assumes.  He  is 
absolutely  sincere  in  each,  and  his  Gaelic 
pose  had  for  him  a  momentous  importance 
that  provoked  the  merriment  of  Dublin, 
where  no  one  really  believes  in  anything 
and  where  nothing  matters  at  all  save  as 
providing  a  subject  for  conversation,  and 
where  if  by  chance  a  noble  aspiration  arises 
in  some  heart,  the  effect  of  its  utterance  is 
exploded  in  the  percussion  of  a  drawing- 
room  jest. 

For  the  cause  of  his  failure  in  Ireland 
Mr.  Moore,  I  think,  sought  everywhere  but 
in  the  right  quarter,  the  quarter  I  have  in- 
dicated above.  His  discovery  that  Catholi- 
cism was  to  blame  for  all  the  futility  of 
Ireland  was  a  very  diverting  one  to  many 

64 


GEORGE  MOORE 


people  who  never  knew  of  Mr.  Moore's 
Catholicism  till  he  announced  his  Protestant- 
ism, and  who  thought  his  conception  of  the 
one  religion  as  funny  as  his  conception  of 
the  other.  In  pursuance  of  my  resolution 
to  wear  no  blinkers  in  this  book,  I  am  not 
afraid  to  state  that  I  think  the  silence  as 
regards  discussion  of  their  religious  ideals 
between  Catholics  and  Protestants  is  the 
most  powerful  cause  of  the  cleavage  between 
the  creeds  in  this  country.  It  leads  to  the 
most  absurd  misconceptions  of  each  other's 
beliefs.  I  do  not  complain  of  any  silence 
in  the  Press  representing  either  side — good- 
ness knows  these  have  yelled  loudly  enough, 
and  I  think  the  Protestant  has  out -yelled 
the  Catholic — I  mean  the  silence  of  social 
intercourse,  the  absence  of  discussion.  I 
speak  as  a  fool  perhaps,  and  my  plea  for 
discussion  may  be  due  to  my  own  "  absurd 
misconception  "  of  the  Catholic  belief.  The 
discussion  of  Catholicism  with  Irish  Catholics 
— except  in  the  ardent  and  early  days  of  the 
Irish  Church  Missions — is  considered  among 
decent  Protestants  nowadays  as  a  hitting 
below  the  belt.  I  can  never  be  quite  sure  if 
this  is  because  Catholicism  in  Ireland  is 
reckoned  among  Protestants  as  largely  the 
religion  of  the  poor  and  as  so  ennobled  by 
their  sufferings  for  it  that  it  is  sacred  from 
our  criticism,  or  if  deep  down  in  the  incur- 
able Protestant  mind  there  is  not  a  per- 
e  65 


GEORGE  MOORE 


suasion  that  to  Catholics  must  be  extended 
the  forbearance  one  gives  to  lunatics  or 
children,  poor  things  with  whom  no  rational 
subject  should  be  discussed  and  whose 
wildest  statements  should  be  allowed  to 
pass  unchallenged  ;  and  that  the  shyness  of 
Catholics  in  speaking  to  us  of  their  religion 
proceeds  from  the  fear  of  our  laughter  and 
of  being  led  away  by  our  superior  wisdom. 
Where  the  first  reason  moves  Protestants 
silence  is  right  and  just;  Protestantism  in 
Ireland  has  a  bitter  record  and  it  does  well 
to  hold  its  tongue  ;  but  to  those  who  are 
neither  poor  nor  unlearned,  why  offer  the 
insult  of  our  silence  ?  My  panacea,  as  you 
may  perceive,  has  at  last  been  offered  ;  I 
cannot  escape  the  common  fate  of  a  writer 
about  Ireland.  Free  discussion  is  my  potion. 
For  God's  sake  let  us  discuss  everything. 
So  only  shall  we  approach  each  other  and 
learn  respect  for  each  other's  point  of  view. 
Everyone  knows  the  value  of  discussion  in 
elucidating  one's  own  cleverness  and  fixing 
one  more  firmly  than  ever  in  one's  own 
opinion,  and  I  have  no  doubt  that  free  dis- 
cussions between  the  religions  in  Ireland 
would  be  of  more  value  to  Catholicism  here 
than  much  motu  proprio  and  many  ne  temere 
decrees,  for  these  it  seems  to  me  in  another 
nation  have  paved  the  way  to  statutes  like 
to  Praemunire. 

It  may  be  that  my  little  ripple  of  wisdom 
66 


GEORGE  MOORE 


will  babble  in  vain  against  the  Rock  of 
Peter,  but  it  is  in  my  nature  to  ripple  on. 
And  as  to  Protestants,  it  was  said  once  of  a 
noble  family  in  the  west  of  Ireland,  "  You 
will  never  get  anything  out  of  a  Browne 
unless  you  kick  him  first,"  and  perhaps  my 
Protestants  will  respond  to  much  kicking 
and  admit  that  their  empty  places  of  worship 
bear  witness  to  the  fatal  influence  of  pros- 
perity upon  a  Christian  Church,  and  will  go 
down  on  their  knees  and  ask  for  the  hasten- 
ing of  those  Protestant  Penal  Laws  that 
some  of  us  may  feel  are  already  overdue. 

While  I  am  not  at  all  sure  that  the  frank- 
ness of  Mr.  Moore  the  Catholic  was  not 
without  benefit  to  that  religion  in  Ireland, 
I  am  perfectly  sure  that  a  Protestant  Mr. 
Moore  is  badly  needed  to  turn  the  hose- 
pipe of  his  criticism  on  Protestant  Ireland, 
and  if  Mr.  Moore  feels  sufficiently  confirmed 
in  the  faith  to  attempt  it  I  invite  him  to  the 
task. 

/ 


67 


IX 

In  "  Parnell  and  His  Island  "  I  find  proof 
i  of  Mr.  Moore's  nationality  as  an  Irishman, 
v  because  the  contempt  and  scorn  in  it  are 
too  bitter  to  be  the  work  of  an  alien.  The 
gibe  that  we  fling  at  an  alien  glances  off 
because  our  knowledge  of  him  is  seldom 
intimate  enough  to  point  it,  but  when  we 
desire  to  wound  our  own  people,  knowing 
the  vulnerable  spots,  our  shafts  get  home. 
There  is  to  me  more  indecency  in  "  Parnell 
and  His  Island  "  than  in  those  of  Mr. 
Moore's  books  where  this  characteristic  is 
said  to  predominate.  It  is  indecent  in  the 
revolting  display  he  makes  of  his  country's 
hurt.  Aristophanes  in  Athens  dared  the 
wrath  of  the  Athenians  when  he  satirised 
their  popular  hero  Cleon  and  himself  took 
the  part  of  the  character  he  satirised.  That 
is  courage;  if  he  had  produced  his  play  in 
Sparta  it  would  have  been  cowardice  and  a 
treachery  to  his  own  city.  What  shall  we 
say  of  Mr.  Moore  who  exhibits  his  country's 
sores  for  the  coppers  of  the  Paris  press,  for 
he  wrote  the  book  first  for  a  French  news- 
paper. In  all  he  has  written  about  his 
friends,    all   his   indefensible   association   of 

68 


GEORGE  MOORE 


their  names  with  events  wholly  fictitious,  I 
have  never  felt  him  so  shameful  as  he  is  in 
this  book.  Of  course  he  never  libelled  me 
in  any  of  his  work — and  perhaps  his  fiction 
had  a  certain  art  about  it  that  blinded  me 
to  its  baseness  and  it  was  fiction.  There  is 
no  art  in  "  Parnell  and  His  Island,"  and 
there  is  sufficient  truth  in  it  to  make  it  a 
horrible  exhibition  of  Mr.  Moore's  own  soul. 
The  writing  is  bad  and  immature,  and  Mr. 
Moore's  almost  ludicrous  haste  to  dissociate 
himself  from  his  country  only  implicates 
him  in  it  more  hopelessly,  because  a  mere 
English  settler,  as  he  strives  to  represent 
himself,  would  have  felt  none  of  the  pain 
that  shrieks  from  every  page  of  the  book. 
He  would  have  had  the  contempt  no  doubt, 
if  he  was  made  like  Mr.  Moore,  but  the  pain 
he  would  not  have  felt,  nor  if  he  had  felt  it 
would  it  have  reached  us  as  through  Mr. 
Moore  it  reaches  us.  As  an  artist  Mr. 
Moore  must  thoroughly  regret  "  Parnell  and 
His  Island,"  and  it  is  one  of  the  books  he 
has  never  ventured  to  rewrite,  though  I 
surmise  black  streams  from  it  trickling 
through  others  of  his  books.  I  do  not  dis- 
like "  Parnell  and  His  Island  "  because  in 
it  Mr.  Moore  traduces  his  country.  Irish- 
men continually  traduce  their  country  and 
sometimes  as  much  by  their  praise  as  by 
their  blame,  but  because  in  this  book  he 
identifies    himself    with    her,    though    such 

69 


GEORGE  MOORE 


was  not  his  intention,  and  the  sharp  edge 
of  truth  bites  in  this  identity  and  it  wounds, 
because  there  does  exist  such  an  Irishman 
as  Mr.  Moore  proves  himself  to  be  here.  I 
wish  there  was  no  such  Irishman  and  that 
Mr.  Moore  had  not  had  to  pass  this  way  on 
his  journey  to  "  The  Untilled  Field."  Mr. 
Moore's  mind  has  a  continual  tendency  to 
nausea  which  spoils  him  as  an  artist.  He 
writes  contemptuously  in  "  Ave  "  of  the 
Irish  that  Douglas  Hyde  spoke,  pouring  as 
inky  stuff  out  of  his  mouth,  but  Mr.  Moore's 
pages  are  perpetually  stained  with  the  inky 
vomit  of  a  mind  incontinent.  This  may  be 
salutary  for  Mr.  Moore,  but  it  is  very  un- 
pleasant for  his  readers. 

It  seems  a  curious  thing  that  a  man  like 
Mr.  Moore,  who  in  his  early  work  disowned 
Ireland,  should  have  been  drawn  to  her 
later  in  life.  We  are  not  now  even  sure  — 
eminent  farewellist  as  he  is — that  he  has 
really  left  her.  It  seems  curious,  but  I  find 
it  quite  natural.  Hate  is  the  other  magnetic 
pole  of  love  and  draws  its  object  towards  it 
just  as  surely.  Mr.  Moore's  hatred  of  Ire- 
land polarised  his  thoughts  towards  Ireland 
and  in  the  end  he  came  here.  Sometimes 
I  fear  that  the  hatred  to  England  evinced 
by  some  of  our  journalists  has  so  preoccupied 
minds  that  might  have  been  of  service  to 
Ireland  that  it  has  caused  them  to  educate 
their  readers  far  more  in  England's  concerns 

70 


GEORGE  MOORE 


than  in  those  of  their  own  nation.  There 
is  no  safety  for  a  man  in  the  practice  of  the 
black  magic  of  hatred.  It  binds  him  hand 
and  foot  and  leads  him  whither  he  would 
not. 

Mr.  Moore's  hatred  of  his  native  land  is 
responsible  no  doubt  for  that  overturning  of 
his  life  that  drew  him  thither.  There  is 
much  that  is  absurd  in  his  own  account  of 
his  gradual  divorce  from  a  Mafficking  London, 
but  there  is  also  much  that  is  pathetic.  I 
was  living  in  London  at  that  time  myself, 
and  I  remember  the  tin-pot  heroics  that 
clanked  side  by  side  with  real  heroism.  I 
remember  tawdry  and  tipsy  processions, 
headed  by  a  whiskey  bottle  in  Hammer- 
smith Broadway,  and  the  trays  and  baths 
and  tin  trumpets  wherewith  respectable 
suburban  London  signalised  a  British  vic- 
tory. I  remember  the  raw  boys,  under- 
sized, underfed,  filling  the  departing  trains, 
the  anguish,  the  fear,  the  shameful  joys  of 
victory.  England  becoming  self-conscious, 
the  tipsy  bully  lashing  himself  into  what  he 
believed  was  a  similitude  of  Elizabethan 
greatness.  It  was  very  pitiful  and  very 
human,  and  South  Africa  was  very  far  away. 
The  London  that  I  see  to-day  in  the  trough 
of  heavy  seas  is  a  very  different  place.  It 
has  grown  up  suddenly  and  in  company 
with  a  grown-up  England.  The  tipsy  bully 
was  sobered  in  South  Africa  by  the  cold 

71 


GEORGE  MOORE 


water  of  many  defeats.  The  final  victory 
indeed  was  England's,  but  not  until  she  had 
been  taught  a  lesson  by  a  handful  of  obscur- 
antist farmers.  To-day  she  is  fighting  a 
bully  of  her  own  size,  it  is  a  graver  and  a 
deadlier  struggle,  and  it  is  at  her  own  doors. 
England  is  anguished  indeed,  and  the  tea- 
tray  and  the  bath  heroics  have  passed  away. 
A  real  heroism,  I  think,  has  taken  their 
place,  and  some  of  the  fineness  of  Elizabethan 
England  has  returned. 

Mr.  Moore's  departure  from  England  at 
the  time  of  the  Boer  War  was  forced  on 
him  by  a  real  loathing  of  London's  attitude 
at  that  time  and  by  as  sincere  a  desire  to 
stand  by  his  country  as  was  possible  to  his 
wayward  heart.  I  have  said  many  harsh 
things  of  Mr.  Moore,  though  never  anything 
so  bad  as  he  has  said  of  himself,  but  the 
interior  sincerity  that  prompted  his  return 
to  Ireland  I  have  never  doubted,  however 
I  may  have  chuckled  at  his  staging  of  the 
part  he  played  here. 


72 


X 


Perhaps  one  might  say  that  "  The  Untilled 
Field  "  was  Mr.  Moore's  indemnity  to  Ire- 
land for  "  Parnell  and  His  Island."  I  often 
wonder  if  it  was  his  own  nature  that  took 
him  by  the  hand  and  showed  him  the  Ire- 
land that  we  find  in  this  book,  or  did  a 
friendly  finger,  "  iE's  "  or  Turgenieff's,  un- 
seal his  darkened  eyes.  I  can  realise  per- 
fectly what  Mr.  Moore  felt  when  he  came  to 
Dublin  and  found  himself  in  a  town  that, 
even  when  it  had  heard  of  them,  cared 
nothing  for  Manet,  for  Balzac,  for  Turgenieff, 
for  French  poets  however  exquisite;  that 
recked  naught  of  the  differences  between 
turbot  and  halibut  and  hake,  or  the  sauces 
which  should  or  should  not  accompany 
these ;  a  people  to  whom  all  Moores  were 
equal,  him  of  the  Melodies  and  him  of  the 
Almanac,  and  to  whom  Frankfort  was  as 
great  as  George.  Yet  a  puzzling  people, 
because  though  they  cared  nothing  for  cul- 
ture, and  ate  but  never  dined,  were  yet  so 
nimble  of  wit,  so  polished  of  tongue,  that 
they  could  not  be  passed  over  as  of  no 
account.  A  people  from  whom  he  felt 
absolutely  divergent  in  all  matters  of  taste 

73 


J 


GEORGE  MOORE 


and  yet  with  whom  he  had  ties  of  tempera- 
ment stronger  than  in  either  of  the  countries 
where  he  had  sojourned.  The  Ireland  Mr. 
Moore  knew  in  his  early  days  was  all  a 
confusion  to  him,  and  detestable  because 
his  crude  and  immature  art  could  not  cope 
with  it.  We  always  detest  what  we  desire 
to  mould  and  yet  cannot  bend  to  our  pur- 
pose. Out  of  that  detestation  he  wrote 
"Parnell  and  His  Island."  But  the  Mr. 
Moore  who  found  himself  in  Ireland  at  the 
time  of  the  Boer  War,  had  matured  and  was 
achieving  his  literary  style.  He  heard  all 
round  him,  amongst  people  whose  lack  of 
culture  he  despised,  brilliant  and  witty 
conversation.  He  heard  Yeats  and  "  M  " 
and  Hughes  and  John  Eglinton  and  Gill  all 
talking  the  most  excellent  copy,  and  in  high 
good  humour  at  the  discovery  of  so  rich  a 
soil  he  sat  down  and  wrote  the  best-natured 
book  he  ever  wrote  about  Ireland,  "  The 
Untilled  Field."  He  felt  no  doubt  that 
Ireland  could  be  made  productive  of  much 
good  literature  for  him  if  he  only  tilled  it. 
Alas,  he  did  not  realise  that  mental  tillage 
had  gone  out  of  fashion  here  and  that  our 
intellect  is  all  laid  down  in  grass. 

Mr.  Moore's  passion  for  re-writing  led  him 
somewhat  astray  in  "  The  Untilled  Field." 
The  first  edition  had  a  spontaneity  and 
simplicity  that  are  sometimes  lost  in  the 
latest  one.    The  reader  is  vexed  by  the  drag- 

74 


GEORGE  MOORE 


ging  into  the  text  of  a  number  of  Mr.  Moore's 
favourite  perversities.  One  recognises  them 
so  well  now,  and  they  serve  no  earthly  pur- 
pose but  to  irritate  the  reader  and  break 
up  the  form  of  an  earlier  and  clearer  narra- 
tive. The  charm  of  the  "  Wild  Goose  " 
was  a  delicate  thing  which  the  last  edition 
of  "  The  Untilled  Field  "  has  shattered.  I 
am  all  against  this  continual  re- writing  of 
books.  Re- write  by  all  means  again  and  \J 
again  while  the  book  is  in  the  process  of 
making,  but  do  not  return  to  a  book  after 
years  and  think  to  recapture  the  mood  in 
which  it  was  written.  When  we  pull  the 
structure  to  pieces  something  essential 
escapes,  something  that  was  enclosed  within 
the  walls  in  the  first  building.  I  think  Mr. 
Moore  became  infected  by  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats' 
passion  for  altering  his  work.  In  Mr.  Moore's 
earlier  work  he  was  more  occupied  with 
the  substance  than  the  form,  but  in  his 
later  the  form  tends  to  master  him.  The 
effect  on  the  reader  of  all  this  re -writing  is 
that  he  begins  to  doubt  the  author's  in- 
spiration and  to  believe  that  he  did  not 
really  know  what  he  wanted  to  say.  That 
definite  imagination  which  is  the  most 
precious  thing  in  any  writer's  work  and  which 
alone  gives  it  authenticity,  becomes  blurred 
and  one  begins  to  suspect  the  fumbler. 

The  preface  to  the  last  edition  of  "  The 
Untilled  Field  "  is  an  entertaining  fantasy. 

75 


GEORGE  MOORE 


Mr.  Moore  claims  that  Synge  got  from 
reading  "  The  Untilled  Field  "  the  inspira- 
tion which  drew  him  out  of  what  Mr.  Moore 
calls  the  "  board-school  English "  of  his 
earlier  work  into  the  living  speech  of  the 
plays.  I  am  afraid  there  are  few  critics  of 
Synge  who  will  take  this  view.  It  is  well 
known  to  every  student  of  Irish  literature 
that  Douglas  Hyde  was  the  true  begetter 
of  the  rich  dialect  based  upon  a  foundation 
of  Gaelic  idiom,  and  anybody  can  prove 
this  who  will  turn  to  Douglas  Hyde's  render- 
ing in  English  of  the  "  Love  Songs  of  Con- 
nacht  "  and  the  "  Commentary."  These 
appeared  long  before  either  Lady  Gregory 
or  Synge  had  loomed  upon  the  literary 
horizon.  Hyde  was  the  first  who,  knowing 
Gaelic  thoroughly,  was  able  to  discern  the 
bony  Gaelic  structure  underlying  the  Anglo- 
Irish  speech,  and  Synge  and  Lady  Gregory, 
who  both  had  some  knowledge  of  Gaelic, 
were  able  to  follow  where  Hyde  pointed  out 
the  way. 

The  Mr.  Moore  in  "  The  Untilled  Field  " 
begins  to  be  a  more  likeable  person  than  the 
novelist  and  critic  we  knew  heretofore.  He 
devotes  as  much  of  his  intelligence  as  he  can 
spare  from  the  development  of  his  art  to  a 
sympathetic  study  of  Ireland  and  her  prob- 
lems. Father  McTurnan,  Father  Maguire, 
Peter  O 'Shane,  Biddy  McHale  are  not  cos- 
mopolitan but  Irish  characters.    "  The  Win- 

76 


GEORGE  MOORE 


dow  "  is,  I  think,  one  of  the  most  poignant 
things  Mr.  Moore  has  written.  The  tales  in 
"  The  Untilled  Field  "  seem  to  me  to  be 
less  art  for  art's  sake,  or  even  art  for  Moore's 
sake,  than  art  for  life's  sake,  yet  they  failed 
to  impress  Dublin.  Many  of  them  were 
translated  into  Irish,  but  the  Gaelic  League 
never  seemed  to  cotton  to  Mr.  Moore,  and 
we  doubt  if  "  The  Untilled  Field  "  as  a  text- 
book ever  enjoyed  the  popularity  accorded 
to  the  manual  that  instructed  our  young 
Gaelic  enthusiasm  to  "  Put  the  butter  on 
the  floor  "  or  recorded  the  unnatural  thirst 
of  "  Art  "  who  went  so  often  to  the  well. 
Among  Mr.  Moore's  circle  in  Dublin  it 
awakened  a  certain  nervousness,  for  Mr. 
Moore  was  quite  manifestly  using  up  his 
friends  for  copy,  and  one  looked  askance  at 
another  and  wondered  how  much  was  au- 
thentic in  the  personal  adventures  attributed 
to  the  characters  in  the  book.  Mr.  Moore's 
friends  were  to  become  better  instructed  as 
to  their  function  in  his  literature  later  on. 

"  The  Lake,"  published  in  1905,  is  memor- 
able because  it  marks,  I  think,  a  change  in 
Mr.  Moore  as  a  writer.  He  had  found  his 
style  and  from  "  The  Lake  "  onwards  he 
handles  it  with  great  ease.  There  is  some 
beautiful  writing  in  "  The  Lake,"  and  the 
book  is  a  feat  of  construction  because  Mr. 
Moore  has  contrived  to  make  a  novel  of 
some  hundreds  of  pages  out  of  the  medita- 

77 


GEORGE  MOORE 


tions  of  one  man  walking  up  and  down 
beside  his  lake  and  with  but  one  idea  in  his 
mind.  Mr.  Moore  is  independent  in  "  The 
Lake  "  of  any  of  that  paraphernalia  of  varied 
character  on  which  the  novelist  usually 
depends.  But  the  book  is,  after  all,  a  tour 
de  force.  The  meditation  of  the  priest  is  a 
personal  struggle  and  has  little  spiritual 
depth  or  intensity.  There  is  in  the  book 
more  technical  merit  of  writing  and  con- 
struction than  there  is  profound  observa- 
tion of  life.  The  name  of  the  priest,  "  Oliver 
Gogarty,"  is  taken  wholesale  from  a  well- 
known  Dublin  doctor,  and  when  the  bearer 
of  the  name  remonstrated  with  Mr.  Moore, 
Mr.  Moore  replied  :  "  Where  can  I  get  a 
name  so  good  ?  "  In  one  sense  the  book  is 
symbolical  if  not  prophetic,  for  was  it  not 
about  the  time  of  its  publication  that  Mr. 
Moore  was  preparing  to  shed  the  last  rags 
of  his  Catholicism  and  appear  as  a  naked 
Protestant  before  an  entirely  unmoved, 
Dublin  ? 


78 


XI 

Mr.  Moore  has  summed  up  in  "  Ave,  Salve 
and  Vale  "  his  Irish  experiences,  and  I  pro- 
pose in  these  chapters  to  sum  up  our  ex- 
periences in  Ireland  of  Mr.  Moore.  In  this  now- 
famous  Trilogy  Mr.  Moore  invented  and  per- 
fected a  strikingly  original  form  of  the  novel. 
It  was  nothing  new  for  a  novelist  to  use  his 
friends  as  models,  and  the  circumstances  of 
his  own  life  and  of  theirs  as  a  framework  for 
his  story.  But  he  was  often  shy  about  it, 
and  disguised  and  varied  circumstance  and 
actor  to  hide  identities.  It  remained  for 
Mr.  Moore,  who  has  never  put  on  his  clothes 
since  the  day  when  as  a  little  boy  in  Stephen's 
Green  he  took  them  all  off  and  ran  naked 
to  the  scandal  of  his  nurse,  to  do  away 
once  for  all  with  subterfuge  in  fiction. 
"The  Untilled  Field"  made  his  friends 
somewhat  nervous,  but  no  names  were 
named.  In  "  The  Lake  "  Oliver  Gogarty's 
name  lent  piquancy  to  Mr.  Moore's  hero. 
It  was  a  sort  of  trial  trip  in  nomenclature, 
and  its  success  encouraged  Mr.  Moore  to 
come  boldly  into  the  open  in  "  Ave  "  and 
attach  names  to  their  rightful  owners,  and 
use  both  names  and  owners  for  the  purposes 

79 


GEORGE  MOORE 


of  fiction  with  a  complete  disregard  for  the 
feelings  of  the  proprietors,  marvelling  only 
that  his  friends  should  prefer  immortality 
in  any  other  form  than  that  he  had  chosen 
for  them.  And  no  doubt  success  justified 
him,  for  though  some  of  his  friends  who  up 
to  this  had  given  him  a  fool's  pardon  for  his 
many  breaches  of  faith  and  manners,  were 
deeply  wounded  by  the  Trilogy,  the  rest  of 
the  world  were  amused  and  interested  by 
this  new  and  daring  form  of  the  novel.  It 
opens  up  a  horrible  vista,  if  this  method  of 
writing  novels  with  real  characters  all  under 
their  own  names  should  become  fashionable, 
and  people  should  even  grow  so  depraved  that 
they  would  actually  desire  to  be  in  such 
novels,  and  it  may  come  at  last  to  this,  that 
we  shall  find  the  fashionable  portrait  painter 
in  literature  as  well  as  in  art.  Sir  Edwin 
and  Lady  Angelina  will  go  to  the  fashion- 
able portrait-painter  in  literature  and  say  : 
"  We  understand  your  terms  for  making  a  por- 
trait novel  of  the  happiest  period  of  our  lives, 
for  an  edition  we  can  distribute  to  our  friends, 
are  £500.  We  have  kept  our  love-letters,  and," 
says  Sir  Edwin,  "  I  have  made  notes  on  my 
disappointed  rivals,  their  lives  and  habits," 
while  Lady  Angelina  slyly  slips  into  the 
painter's  hand  her  notes  on  the  girl  who 
wanted  to  marry  Sir  Edwin,  and  all  her  little 
cackling  ways.  The  Yellow  Journalism  of 
America,  with  its  shameless  inquisition  into 

80 


GEORGE  MOORE 


private  life,  has  paved  the  way  for  a  novel 
such  as  is  foreshadowed  in  "  Ave."  We  are 
a  shy  people  in  Ireland  now,  and  Mr. 
Moore's  revelations  affected  us  to  hissing  as 
the  red-hot  iron  affects  the  drop  of  water. 
It  was  not  always  so  with  us  ;  when  we 
were  an  independent  people  our  social  frank- 
ness was  a  terror,  and  our  invective  hot  as 
the  hob  of  hell. 

This  personality  of  ours  that  we  have 
tailored  so  carefully  in  tradition  and  pre- 
judice in  order  that  it  may  appear  with 
fashion  and  credit  amongst  the  figures  of 
our  world — is  all  in  outcry  against  the  rude 
unrobing  of  writers  such  as  Mr.  Moore.  But 
let  us  be  honest.  Does  not  this  outcry  per- 
haps mean  that  we  fear  a  deeper  inquisi- 
tion and  the  dragging  into  publicity  of  things 
in  our  nature  that  might  not  posture  so 
well  in  the  limelight  as  that  carefully  garbed 
and  tutored  figure  by  whom  we  desire  to  be 
represented,  an  inquisition  that  foreshadows 
that  Dread  Day  when  the  secrets  of  all 
hearts  shall  be  made  manifest  ?  I  think 
when  we  go  profoundly  into  ourselves, 
behind  this  masking  personality,  we  are 
confronted  with  a  franker  being  who  desires 
that  all  barriers  shall  be  broken  down  ;  who 
realises  the  oneness  of  human  life,  and  that 
our  lives  are  continued  in  the  lives  of  others  ; 
one  who  is  weary  to  death  of  the  elaboration 
of  our  concealments  from  one  another  and 
f  81 


GEORGE  MOORE 


who  would  have  all  things  known,  even  the 
worst.  What  is  there  to  be  afraid  of  after 
all  in  the  common  humanity  we  share  ? 
Mr.  Moore  has  perhaps  encountered  this 
being  in  himself,  and  has  some  inkling  of  this 
truth,  but  with  a  perversity  usual  to  him 
he  seems  to  seek  truth  not  for  purposes  of 
soul  but  for  purposes  of  art.  I  sometimes 
think  Mr.  Moore  knows  very  well  what  he  is 
about,  and  how  wrong  is  the  motive  of  his 
inquisition  into  other  lives,  and  that  a  con- 
sciousness of  wrong  doing  makes  him  un- 
scrupulous in  the  uses  to  which  he  puts  his 
knowledge. 

Mr.  Moore  should  have  called  his  Trilogy 
"  George  Moore — A  Novel  of  Contemporary 
Life,"  for  it  is  a  work  of  fiction  improvised 
upon  his  friends  and  himself.  That  it  is 
exceedingly  well  done  will  not  console  those 
who  have  gained  through  it  an  immortality 
they  never  coveted.  Perhaps  there  is  but 
one  portrait  in  the  books  that  most  people 
in  Dublin  will  acknowledge  to  be  a  genuine 
one,  and  that  is  the  portrait  of  John  Eglin- 
ton.  Mr.  Moore  has  painted  him  with  great 
skill,  real  comprehension  and  kindliness. 
To  "  M "  he  has  been  more  than  kind, 
furnishing  one  who  makes  no  claim  to  saint 
ship  with  a  halo  he  has  no  use  for.  "  M~ 
is  reported  to  have  said  to  him  :  "  Moore, 
you  have  a  passionate  literary  affection  for 
me,  but  it  is  the  affection  of  a  porcupine, 

82 


?5 


GEORGE  MOORE 


unconscious    of    its    quills,    rubbing    itself 
against  the  bare  legs  of  a  child." 

Mr.  Moore  has  been  most  flagrantly  un- 
just in  his  portrait  of  Douglas  Hyde,  paint- 
ing the  outer  man  indeed  with  a  merciless 
fidelity  but  totally  uncomprehending  of  the 
real  Hyde.  It  is  a  portrait  that  cries  aloud 
for  vengeance  on  the  painter.  When  "  JE  " 
told  Mr.  Moore  that  his  portrait  of  Hyde 
was  glaringly  unfair,  he  replied  that  it  was 
a  case  of  Jekyll  and  Hyde,  he  had  painted 
Hyde  and  Jekyll  wras  coming  on.  But 
Jekyll  never  came  on.  I  am  inclined  to 
think  that  an  incompatibility  of  tempera- 
ment between  the  two  types  of  Connaught 
men  accounts  for  Mr.  Moore's  malevolence 
about  Douglas  Hyde,  all  the  nausea  of 
"  Parnell  and  His  Island  "  surges  up  again 
in  his  onslaught  on  him.  How  indignant  one 
feels  at  the  base  caricature  of  one  whose 
name  in  Ireland  is  beloved  beyond  most 
names  ;  the  man  who  drew  out  of  the  gutter 
where  we  ourselves  had  flung  her,  the 
language  of  our  country,  and  set  a  crown 
upon  her  ;  who  by  sheer  force  of  personality 
created  the  movement  in  Ireland  for  the  re- 
vival of  Gaelic,  blowing  with  a  hot  enthu- 
siasm on  that  dying  spark  of  nationhood  and 
recalling  it  to  life.  Those  who  know  "  The 
Love  Songs  of  Connacht "  will  not  need  to 
be  told  that  here  was  the  soul  of  a  poet. 
The  movement  he  blasted  out  of  the  rock  of 

83 


GEORGE  MOORE 


Anglo-Irish  prejudice  in  his  epic.  I  wonder 
how  many  people  realise  to-day  in  Ireland 
what  it  meant  to  give  back  to  the  Gael  his 
language  ;  how  the  honour  Hyde  put  upon 
the  language  and  the  literature  straightened 
the  back  of  young  Ireland  and  interpene- 
trated all  its  thoughts.  I  am  prepared  to 
be  told,  with  that  curious  desire  to  depreciate 
that  is  common  to  my  countrymen,  that  the 
Gaelic  revival  in  Ireland  was  really  the  work 
of  some  bookworm  or  obscure  grammarian. 
There  are  always  little  persons  to  be  found 
in  Dublin  grubbing  in  darkness  that  they 
may  undermine  some  reputation,  but  Doug- 
las Hyde  is  safe  in  Ireland.  We  who  remem- 
ber those  days  know  what  Ireland  owes  to 
Hyde's  fiery  spirit,  his  immense  courage, 
his  scholarship,  his  genius  for  organisation, 
his  sincerity,  his  eloquence,  and  the  kind- 
ness of  his  heart. 

As  to  Mr.  Moore's  little  parable  of  Bouvard 
and  Pecuchet.  How  ungrateful  he  is  to 
Pecuchet,  for  he  must  often  have  watched 
Mr.  Gill  with  half -closed  eyes  as  a  cat 
watches  a  saucer  of  cream,  dreaming  of  the 
copy  he  should  lap  up  by  and  by.  Mr.  Gill 
was  a  ready-made ,  Pecuchet,  and  how  well 
Mr.  Moore  knew  him.  He  had  to  find  his 
Bouvard,  and  he  selected  Sir  Horace  Plun- 
kett,  whom  he  did  not  know  at  all,  for  the 
part.  Mr.  Moore's  comic  repentance  of  this 
caricature  I  have  already  described.     Few 

84 


GEORGE  MOORE 


people  know  Sir  Horace  Plunkett ;  though 
he  is  the  most  approachable  of  men,  he  is 
reserved  as  only  your  frank  Irishman  can 
be.  His  portrait  presents  many  difficulties, 
for  I  might  say  with  perfect  truth  that  he  is 
a  statesman,  a  large-minded,  clear-thinking, 
most  witty  and  most  courteous  gentleman, 
and  I  should  not  have  conveyed  any  worthy 
picture  of  him  or  one  at  all  equal  to  that 
which  springs  up  in  the  minds  of  his  friends 
at  the  mention  of  his  name.  He  stands,  I 
think,  this  unassuming  figure,  for  something 
that  shall  be  more  intimately  of  the  future 
spirit  of  our  country  than  any  shouting 
shibboleth  of  to-day.  That  one  who  is  so 
typically  an  Irishman  in  the  individualism 
of  his  thinking  should  be  little  understood 
in  his  own  country  is  not  perhaps  very 
wonderful.  In  Ireland  we  are  accustomed 
to  see  a  man's  mind  obliterated  in  the 
movement  with  which  it  is  identified,  and 
that  Sir  Horace  has  not  so  obliterated  his 
mind  somewhat  disconcerts  us.  Much  has 
been  written  of  him  in  praise  and  blame, 
and  I  see  no  reason  why  I  should  not  sum 
up  the  view  he  presents  to  my  mind.  I  see 
him  as  a  man  who  does  his  own  thinking, 
excluding  no  one's  opinions,  however  ex- 
treme, but  considering  all  ideas  that  are 
presented  to  him  with  a  mind  dispassionate, 
but  never  cold.  His  judgment  is  never 
clouded   by   temper,    and    one    can    always 

85 


GEORGE  MOORE 


trust  him  absolutely  in  every  circumstance 
to  take  the  noble  point  of  view.  He  is  gifted 
also  in  a  way  that  is  not  perhaps  generally 
realised  with  a  wit  that  bites  like  mustard, 
and  gets  home  to  its  mark  as  unerringly  as 
the  arrow  of  William  Tell. 


XII 

I  have  some  right,  I  think,  to  speak  of 
Dublin  at  the  time  of  Mr.  Moore's  advent, 
for  I  was  living  here  myself,  and  I  was  ac- 
quainted with  many  of  the  dramatis  personam 
amongst  whom  Mr.  Moore  was  shortly  to 
distribute  their  parts.  I  can  thoroughly 
realise  the  feeling  of  Mr.  Moore,  who,  living 
in  London,  had  smelt  out  the  pie  that  was 
being  made  in  Dublin  and  felt  that  he 
himself  was  one  of  the  ingredients  that  must 
not  be  missing.  I,  too,  had  my  feelings  in 
the  matter  of  pies.  When  I  was  a  young 
girl  in  Dublin  I  lived  next  door  to  the  family 
of  Purser,  and  Miss  Sarah  Purser,  then  as 
now  the  wittiest  woman  in  Dublin,  was  the 
heroine  of  my  girlish  imagination.  I  felt 
I  had  no  talents  to  equal  me  to  such  people, 
but  I  had  a  singing  voice  and  through  it  I 
would  claim  my  right  to  be  among  them. 
Many  a  time  have  I  sat  on  the  stairs  at  the 
top  of  the  house  singing  away  my  whole 
soul  that  it  might  reach  them  through  the 
wall  and  prove  that  title  to  be  their  equal 
that  the  music  in  me  claimed.  Many  a 
year  it  took  me  before  I  got  any  real  share 
of  their  pie,   and  therefore   I  cannot   help 

87 


GEORGE  MOORE 


admiring  the  daring  with  which  Mr.  Moore 
at  once  dashed  for  Ireland  and  secured  his 
portion. 

There  was  something  pathetic  in  Mr. 
Moore's  return  to  his  native  land.  Her  son 
who  had  made  himself  famous  in  France 
and  England  returning  to  build  up  her 
fortune  with  his  fame  and  to  swagger  a 
little  becomingly  in  his  benevolence.  And 
Dublin — Dublin  who  cares  for  none  of  Ire- 
land's sons  famous  or  infamous,  except 
those  who  stand  her  drinks  — killed  no  fatted 
calf  for  her  prodigal,  never  even  knew  of 
his  return ;  worse  still,  never  even  knew  he 
had  been  away.  But  Mr.  Moore,  who  had 
mined  for  himself  out  of  his  own  reluctant 
bowels  a  career  and  a  fame,  was  not  to  be 
daunted  by  any  neglect  or  contempt  in 
Dublin  from  shouldering  his  way  in  and 
arranging  his  pieces  on  a  stage  of  his  own 
making. 

In  those  first  years  of  the  century  it  seemed 
to  us  in  Ireland  as  if  not  only  were  our  own 
geese,  beloved  and  wild,  returning  to  us, 
but  tame  geese,  not  our  own,  were  flocking 
hither  also.  A  queen  of  England  who  had 
not  set  foot  in  our  island  for  a  generation, 
led  the  fashion.  One  who  when  she  was 
young  and  girded  herself,  walking  whither 
she  would,  walked  not  hither ;  but  who, 
when  she  was  old,  and  another  girded  her, 
bringing  her   whither   she   would   not,   was 

88 


GEORGE  MOORE 


borne  amongst  us.  And  many  English  people 
at  that  time  were  displaying  on  their  family 
trees  before  admiring  circles,  Irish  grand- 
mothers who  had  hitherto  shared  the  cup- 
board with  other  family  skeletons.  The 
English  are  a  simple  folk  and  one  cannot  be 
hard  upon  them.  On  such  simple  lines  the 
gods  build  up  great  nations. 

Dublin  at  the  time  Mr.  Moore  came  here 
was  a  very  pleasant  place  to  live  in.  It 
had  all  the  ingredients  of  an  agreeable 
literary  society  and  a  number  of  persons 
interested  in  art  or  literature  or  humanity 
either  lived  here  or  made  the  city  frequent 
visits.  George  Moore  said  of  Dublin  that  its 
"  acoustic  properties  were  perfect,"  so  that 
no  jest,  be  it  whispered  ever  so  softly  in 
the  closet,  fails  to  be  heard  on  the  remotest 
house-top.  It  is  an  ideal  home  for  clever 
talkers.  John  Butler  Yeats  uprooted  his 
family  from  London  where  they  had  been 
settled  for  some  years  and  returned  here  to 
live.  In  his  studio  in  Stephen's  Green  he 
painted  and  talked  all  day  long.  Mr.  Yeats 
brought  his  two  daughters,  distinguished  in 
mind  as  are  all  the  Yeats  family,  sharing 
with  their  father  the  gift — made  memorable 
by  him  in  his  portraits  of  women— of  dis- 
covering beautiful  and  lovable  character- 
istics in  their  friends.  John  Butler  Yeats 
had  the  rare  quality  that  he  not  only  made 
his  women  pretty,  any  artist  can  do  that, 

89 


GEORGE  MOORE 


but  he  made  them  lovable,  manifesting 
some  interior  beauty  in  their  souls.  Incom- 
parable executants  like  Sargent  and,  William 
Orpen  have  not  this  faculty  ;  they  exhibit 
all  a  woman's  character,  but  no  spiritual 
life  looks  out  of  the  faces  that  are  so  superbly 
drawn.  Nathaniel  Hone  lived  here,  the  last 
survivor  of  the  Barbizon  School,  an  old 
associate  of  Corot  and  Millet,  full  of  reminis- 
cences of  famous  men  who  seem  to  us  to 
belong  to  the  classical  history  of  art  and 
himself  the  most  distinguished  landscape 
painter  Ireland  ever  produced,  with  a  massive 
power  of  building  up  the  architecture  of  a 
landscape,  which  is  rare  even  amongst  the 
greatest  painters.  Another  attractive  per- 
sonality in  Dublin  at  that  time  was  Walter 
Osborne,  the  artist,  a  most  competent  crafts- 
man, a  charming  companion  and  lovable 
man  whose  early  death  was  a  great  loss  to 
Ireland.  John  Hughes  lived  in  Dublin 
then,  a  sculptor  of  real  talent  and  still  more 
attractive  by  his  personality,  capable  of 
pungent  remarks,  absolutely  free  in  his 
mind.  Unfortunately  for  himself  he  drew 
upon  him  Mr.  Moore's  voracious  literary 
eye,  and  he  made  him  the  Rodney  of  "  The 
Untilled  Field."  I  do  not  know  whether  it 
is  due  to  this  exploitation  of  his  personality 
that  Mr.  Hughes  decided  to  live  in  Paris 
evermore.  William  Orpen  was  also  a  fre- 
quent  visitor   to   Dublin,    as   free   as   John 

90 


GEORGE  MOORE 


Hughes  in  his  mind  and  the  most  devoted 
slave  of  the  brush  that  ever  came  out  of 
Ireland.  While  here  he  painted  one  of  the 
innumerable  portraits  of  the  subject  of  this 
monogram.  His  slavery  to  his  tools  no 
doubt  made  him  the  master  of  his  art  that 
he  is  at  present.  Sometimes  Jack  Yeats 
came  here,  whimsical  and  kindly,  most 
winning  of  all  the  Yeats  ;  turning  by  his 
genius  peasants,  farmers,  tinkers,  and  the 
monstrosities  of  the  shows  into  symbolic 
images.  That  nothing  might  be  lacking  in 
the  attractiveness  of  the  city  of  Dublin 
to  a  man  of  Moore's  temperament,  there 
flashed  across  it  the  most  brilliant  con- 
noisseur of  modern  times,  the  generous,  pub- 
lic-spirited, ever-to-be-lamented  Sir  Hugh 
Lane. 

Mr.  Moore's  younger  brother,  Colonel 
Maurice  Moore,  often  visited  Dublin  in  those 
days.  He  has  a  great  deal  of  the  family 
literary  talent  and  a  power  of  pungent 
speech  which  shows  that  if  he  had  not  been 
a  soldier  he  might  have  attained  a  consider- 
able reputation  as  a  writer.  Mr.  Moore  has 
painted  his  brother  skilfully  and  merci- 
lessly in  the  Trilogy,  it  might  not  be  seemly 
for  one  brother  to  retort  on  the  other  by  a 
counter  portrait,  but  as  far  as  insight  into 
character  is  concerned,  Maurice  Moore  rather 
than  myself  should  have  been  chosen  to 
write  this  epilogue  on  George  Moore's  literary 

91 


GEORGE  MOORE 


career.  For  those  who  know  Colonel  Moore 
only  through  the  pages  of  the  Trilogy  it 
may  be  well  to  state,  on  George  Moore's 
private  admission,  to  which  we  have  already 
referred,  that  Maurice  has  always  behaved 
like  a  gentleman.  But  Maurice  Moore  is 
more  than  that.  He  is  a  distinguished  soldier 
who  was  the  chief  military  organiser  of  the 
National  Volunteers,  a  force  which  Sir 
Matthew  Nathan  states  attained  a  member- 
ship of  160,000.  He  is  a  good  Irishman, 
with  the  fixed  principles  which  are  more 
readily  appreciated  by  the  public  than  the 
fluent  ones  possessed  by  his  brother  George. 
An  artist  who  takes  or  drops  his  principles 
on  their  literary  value  is  very  disconcerting 
to  the  ordinary  citizen.  It  is  certainly  dis- 
composing to  find  a  man  who  a  year  ago 
was  enthusiastic  about  some  idea  turning  a 
cold  shoulder  upon  it  because  it  has  served 
his  purpose  as  an  artist  and  there  is  no  more 
copy  in  it.  Maurice  Moore's  principles  were 
not  those  of  an  artist  but  those  of  a  patriot. 
From  the  very  fine  book  he  wrote  about  his 
father  we  gather  that  Colonel  Maurice  Moore 
inherits  from  him  that  public  honesty  which 
was,  I  think,  George  Henry  Moore's  greatest 
gift  to  the  politics  of  his  generation.  George 
Henry  Moore  possessed  a  fine  honesty  and 
frankness  which  he  bequeathed  to  his  sons 
— the  honesty  to  Maurice,  the  frankness  to 
George. 

92 


GEORGE  MOORE 


Douglas  Hyde,  whose  eloquent  tongue 
could  coax  the  Gaelic  off  the  bushes,  was 
continually  here,  the  brain  and  will  of  the 
Gaelic  League.  There  were  Lady  Gregory 
and  William  Butler  Yeats,  an  Orpheus  who 
drew  that  Eurydice  out  of  the  Hades  of 
Irish  landlordism — strange  that  his  music 
should  also  have  attracted  so  unlikely  a 
ghost  as  Mr.  Moore. 

Professor  Mahaffy  lived  here.  When  Mr. 
Moore  came  first  to  Dublin  he  was  in- 
veigled by  a  fierce  environment  of  Gaels  into 
an  attack  on  Professor  Mahaffy,  which  he 
bitterly  regretted  a  short  time  after  it  was 
made  on  hearing  that  Professor  Mahaffy 
had  once  said  that  "  Catholicism  was  essen- 
tially the  religion  of  the  lower  classes." 
"  What  a  friend  he  would  have  been,"  said 
Mr.  Moore.  Professor  Tyrrell,  with  a  wit 
polished  in  the  classic  manner,  lived  here ; 
and  there  was  also  Professor  Edward  Dow-  *^ 
den,  an  excellent  critic  of  literature  which 
had  become  a  classic,  but,  like  most  critics 
a  rather  more  dubious  commentator  on 
his  contemporaries ;  a  really  distinguished 
mind  but  without  much  sympathy  for 
intellectual  revivals  in  his  own  country. 
They  seemed  to  him  revolutionary,  and  he 
compared  his  attitude  to  them  to  Burke's 
attitude  to  the  French  Revolution,  and 
seemed  rather  to  take  a  pride  in  acknow- 
ledging   that    he    was    the    solitary    Irish 

93 


GEORGE  MOORE 


intellectual    on    the    side    of     the     stupid 
people. 

Edward  Martyn  was  frequently  in  Dublin 
then,  interested  in  all  that  made  for  beauty 
in  his  country.  His  cousin  George  Moore, 
in  the  Trilogy  has  fashioned  him  into  a  sort 
of  scapegoat  for  his  own  personal  antipa- 
thies, castigating  him  for  sins  he  never 
sinned.  The  real  Martyn,  who  hates  a 
draught  as  he  hates  the  devil,  held  his 
ground  bluffly  against  all  the  ill-winds  that 
cousinly  venom  could  direct  against  him, 
using  the  consolations  of  a  religion  he  had 
fashioned  for  himself  out  of  music  and  the 
drama.  He  comes  out  of  the  adversity  of 
the  Trilogy  triumphantly  ;  a  figure  whom 
one  regards  with  affection.  "  Dear  Edward  " 
was  clever  enough  to  deprive  George  Moore 
of  the  triumph  of  knowing  what  his  victim 
thought  of  his  own  portrait,  for  he  steadily 
refused  to  read  the  Trilogy,  saying  :  "  George 
is  a  pleasant  fellow  to  meet,  and  if  I  read  the 
book  I  might  not  be  able  to  meet  him  again." 
"  Dear  Edward  "  is  dear  to  his  friends,  not 
as  he  is  dear  to  the  malicious  literary  affec- 
tion of  Mr.  Moore,  but  for  his  straightfor- 
ward and  honest  humanity,  and  in  spite  of 
Mr.  Moore's  malicious  portrait,  I  am  certain 
there  is  no  one  living  for  whom  he  has  so 
sincere  an  affection  as  for  Edward  Martyn. 
Mr.  Moore  has  always  bestowed  his  respect 
on  those  who  have  the  courage  to  disagree 

94 


GEORGE  MOORE 


with  him,  and  anybody  who  has  seen  Mr. 
Moore  on  the  war  trail  for  a  scalp  knows  it 
requires  uncommon  courage  to  do  so.  Sir 
Horace  Plunkett  was  in  Dublin  at  that 
time,  the  puzzle  of  the  politicians,  none  of 
whom  have  any  politics  at  all  but  supply 
this  deficiency  on  the  one  side  by  prejudices, 
on  the  other  by  public-houses.  There  was 
also  Mr.  Rolleston,  who  should  have  been  a 
scholar  but  for  his  entanglement  in  an 
economic  movement ;  with  an  elasticity  of 
temperament  which  caused  him  at  his  first 
contact  with  Irish  Nationality  to  bound  into 
Fenianism  and  from  thence  to  rebound  into 
an  Imperialism  that  carried  him  across  the 
sea  to  become  permanently  an  Englishman. 
Yet  I  feel  that  the  man  who  gave  us  the 
beautiful  words  of  a  poem  like  "  The  Dead 
at  Clonmacnoise,"  pervading  it  with  the 
honey  breath  of  midland  Ireland,  deserved 
more  than  the  punctured  Messiahship  ac- 
corded him  by  Mr.  Moore.  "  M  "  was  here 
— whom  reviewers  in  continually  increasing 
numbers  charge  with  being  a  poet,  a  painter, 
and  an  economist,  tracing  his  career  from 
the  Esplanade  at  Bray,  where  he  preached 
the  Ancient  Gods  of  Ireland,  through  the 
counting-house  to  the  bicycle  whereon  he 
roamed  Ireland  organising  co-operative 
societies,  and  into  the  editorial  chair  of  the 
Irish  Homestead ;  but  who,  in  spite  of  this 
weight  of  evidence  against  him,  remains  a 

95 


GEORGE  MOORE 


friendly  human  being  who  loves  a  laugh 
even  at  his  own  expense,  and  who  would  be 
surprised  and  probably  annoyed  if  he  knew 
that  there  are  some  who  believe  that  in 
Ireland  all  roads  lead  to  "  JE  "  !  William 
Butler  Yeats  came  here,  a  poet  with  a  more 
exquisite  craft  in  the  use  of  words  than  any 
living  poet,  and  — the  noblest  figure  of  them 
all — a  solitary,  unconcerned  with  any  move- 
ment, but  himself  an  incarnation  of  the  soul 
of  Ireland — Standish  O' Grady.  A  name 
almost  unknown  across  the  Channel,  and 
often  confused  with  his  cousin  Standish 
Hayes  O' Grady,  the  Gaelic  scholar.  In  the 
"  Bardic  History  of  Ireland,"  he  opened 
with  a  heroic  gesture  the  doors  which  re- 
vealed to  us  in  Ireland  the  giant  brood  of 
the  Red  Branch  Knights  and  the  Fianna. 
Though  a  prose  writer,  he  may  be  called 
the  last  of  the  bards,  a  true  comrade  of 
Homer. 

Every  now  and  then  Synge  would  loom 
up  here,  saying  little  and  obviously  not  at 
home  in  cities  and  much  more  a  companion 
of  the  Arran  peasant  than  of  the  Dublin 
literary  folk. 

Among  other  literary  persons  there  were 
John  Eglinton,  so  affectionately  referred  to 
in  the  Trilogy;  Richard  Irvine  Best,  who 
turned  from  an  original  love  of  Pater  and 
Wilde  and  other  decadent  exquisites  to 
become    a    genuine    scholar    and    editor    of 

96 


GEORGE  MOORE 


ancient  Irish  texts ;  Oliver  Gogarty,  who 
had  but  just  nipped  the  wires  of  the  cham- 
pagne of  his  wit  and  sprayed  a  pungent 
froth  around  him. 

The  infinite  variety  of  Dublin  life  brought 
also  a  dramatic  interest  which  must  be  dear 
to  an  actor  such  as  Mr.  Moore.  This  interest 
in  the  theatre  brought  him  into  contact 
with  Frank  Fay,  who  had  invented  a  method 
of  teaching  actors  to  speak  beautifully,  an 
art  which  the  Abbey  Theatre  has  not  yet 
lost,  and  his  brother  Willie  Fay,  an  actor 
comparable  in  his  own  range  to  a  James 
Welch,  who  made  a  most  perfect  study  of 
"  The  Playboy  of  the  Western  World  "  and 
who  could — such  was  his  strangely  com- 
pounded character — have  explained  to  you 
the  ethics  of  Epictetus  or  the  esoteric  signifi- 
cance of  the  memoirs  of  the  Comte  de 
Gabalis. 

At  a  further  period  of  Mr.  Moore's  stay 
in  Dublin  Seumas  O'Sullivan,  Padraic  Colum, 
and  later  on  James  Stephens,  began  to  be 
prominent,  and  one  cannot  pass  from  this 
company  without  mentioning  Mr.  Commis- 
sioner Bailey,  clever,  discriminating,  at 
whose  hospitable  house  anything  that 
painted,  sang,  composed,  or  acted  was  sure 
of  a  welcome. 

With  all  these  colours  on  his  palette,  Mr. 
Moore  in  the  end  selected  for  his  picture 
the    most     permanent     tints,    dipping     his 
g  97 


GEORGE  MOORE 


brush  often  in  the  luscious  human  com- 
pound of  T.  P.  Gill ;  W.  B.  Yeats,  and  "  JE," 
attracted  by  their  brilliant  colouring,  while 
his  brother  Maurice  supplied  the  sombre 
tones. 


98 


XIII 

All  these  diverse  persons  were  to  be  found 
in  Dublin,  for  the  most  part  hating  each 
other  like  poison,  but  shortly  "  cross  as  an 
armful  of  cats,"  and  with  or  without  their 
consent  to  be  drawn  together  in  Mr.  Moore's 
all-embracing  literary  affection.  To  a 
novelist  a  society  such  as  this  Irish  one  was 
infinitely  attractive.  In  Ireland  humanity 
develops  in  its  natural  forms,  it  is  like 
virgin  forest,  untamed,  untrained,  uncivilised, 
there  has  been  no  settled  social  order  to 
constrain  its  growth.  The  difference  be- 
tween society  in  England  and  Ireland  seems 
to  me  to  be  as  the  difference  between  wild 
forest  and  forest  scientifically  planted  by  a 
state  forester.  The  English  novelists  since 
Dickens  days  have  to  grub  very  far  below 
surfaces  to  find  any  differentiation  in  their 
characters.  The  tall,  clean,  well-set-up 
"  God's  Englishman  "  has  become  a  national 
ideal.  Irish  Society  has  no  such  minted 
ideal  and  it  is  unlucky  in  its  false  coinage, 
aping  with  equal  unhappiness  what  is  un- 
real in  English  as  well  as  in  Irish  character. 
The  natural  Irishman  is  then  an  orgy  of 
temperament,  very  often  a  delightful  being, 

99 


GEORGE  MOORE 


because — Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  must  pardon 
me — I  think  a  choicer  portion  of  wits  fell 
to  this  small  island  than  to  its  more  roomy 
companion,  though  the  culture  that  has 
been  a  good  friend  to  our  companion,  we 
to  our  great  hurt  have  scorned.  It  is  not 
unlikely  that  it  is  the  consciousness  of  un- 
trammelled temperament  that  makes  an 
Irishman  so  desirous  of  that  pigeonhole 
retreat  for  his  soul  to  which  I  have  referred 
in  another  chapter,  so  unhappy  when  he  has 
found  it,  and  so  confident  that  it  is  good  for 
all  other  Irishmen  and  so  determined  to 
place  them  there. 

At  the  time  of  Mr.  Moore's  return  to 
Dublin  some  of  the  group  of  intellectuals 
whom  I  have  described  were  gravitating 
towards  the  drama.  The  story  of  the  in- 
tellectual revival  in  drama  in  Ireland  has 
been  told  so  often  and  with  such  canonical 
authority  that  to  begin  to  disentangle  truth 
from  falsehood  now  would  be  a  thankless 
task  and  one  outside  the  scope  of  this  book. 
It  is  sufficient  for  my  purpose  here  that  I 
give  the  honour  of  the  inception  of  the  idea 
of  a  school  of  Irish  actors  where  the  honour 
is  due,  to  the  brothers  Frank  and  William 
Fay.  While  Mr.  Yeats,  not  himself  naturally 
a  dramatist,  turned  the  thoughts  of  most  of 
his  literary  contemporaries  in  Ireland  into 
the  writing  of  plays,  the  Fay  brothers  were 
the  avatars  of  a  new  creed  in  Irish  acting. 

100 


GEORGE  MOORE 


They  laboured  at  their  uncommon  task 
each  evening  when  the  common  labour  of 
the  day  was  done,  Frank  with  his  passion 
for  beauty  in  speech  instructing  his  dis- 
ciples, young  men  and  women  workers  such 
as  he  himself,  and  Willie,  holding  the  little 
company  together  by  his  genius  as  an  actor. 
Not  yet,  however,  had  the  temple  been 
built  that,  like  so  many  other  fanes,  should 
smother  the  religion  it  sought  to  shelter, 
and  Yeats'  "  Countess  Cathleen "  had  to 
content  itself  with  English  actors,  and  when 
the  dual  play,  Yeats'  and  Moore's  "  Dermiud 
and  Grania  "  was  evolved,  the  Benson  com- 
pany presented  it  on  the  boards  in  Dublin. 

The  writing  of  this  play  was  in  itself  a 
play.  The  conjunction  of  such  planetary 
bodies  as  Yeats  and  Moore,  who  should  have 
been  by  nature  always  in  opposition,  was  a 
portent  in  the  literary  heaven.  Our  Yeats, 
curved  and  spiral,  a  Celtic  wonder  in  mind, 
at  home  in  the  magical  regions  of  Tirnanoge 
— where  are  land  and  water,  sowing  and 
reaping  but  as  the  heart  desires  them — and 
Moore,  the  bantling  of  Mayo  and  Mont- 
martre,  concerning  himself  too  often  with 
what  Saintsbury  calls  the  "  fie-fie  "  side  of 
the  naturalism  whose  by-product  he  was. 
What  an  alliance  !  Literary  Dublin  sought 
in  the  play  with  intense  interest  for  the 
footmarks  of  the  writers  and  when  it 
found  God  Angus  described  as  "  A  ragged 

101 


GEORGE  MOORE 


old  man  wandering  along  the  mountains 
prodding  a  boar,"  it  cried  "  Lo  Yeats " 
and  behold  it  was  Moore,  and  coming  on 
the  description  of  Conan  scratching  his  head 
and  complaining  of  lice  it  said  "  Lo 
Moore  "  and  behold  it  was  Yeats.  Yeats 
had  come  to  the  collaboration  determined 
to  be  substantial  and  material  like  Moore. 
Moore  had  resolved  to  rise  to  the  heaven 
of  the  picturesque  and  beautiful  to  meet 
Yeats.  They  had  passed  each  other  on  the 
journey.  The  lice  came  out  of  Mr.  Yeats' 
fancy  and  the  Sidhe  out  of  Mr.  Moore's. 

Mr.  Moore  was  ever  a  hero-worshipper,  and 
when  Yeats,  during  the  writing  of  the  play, 
made  such  strange  suggestions  as  that  the 
first  act  should  be  horizontal,  the  second 
perpendicular,  and  the  third  circular,  Mr. 
Moore  was  puzzled,  but  reverent.  Walking 
under  his  apple  trees  in  Ely  Place  he  cogi- 
tated. "  The  first  act — Grania,  the  nurse, 
etc.  Is  that  horizontal  ?  Yes,  surely  that 
must  be  horizontal."  Going  on  to  the  second 
act,  the  question,  "  What  is  perpendicular  in 
drama  ?  "  struck  a  dumb  note  in  his  mind, 
and  that  mind  failed  altogether  when  he 
came  to  consider  the  circular  in  relation  to 
the  third  act.  This  story  and  the  fact  that 
he  accepted  from  Mr.  Yeats  a  list  of  words 
that  must  not  be  used  because  they  had 
been  used  in  literature  too  much  already, 
and  that  he  even  contemplated  writing  his 

102 


GEORGE  MOORE 


part  of  the  play  in  French,  Lady  Gregory 
to  translate  it  into  English  for  Yeats  to 
work  on,  show  in  a  man  so  full  of  vanity 
and  egoism  as  Mr.  Moore  an  extraordinary 
power  of  abasing  himself  before  one  whom 
he  regarded  as  a  master  in  the  guild  of  litera- 
ture. We  can  never  be  quite  certain  that 
this  worship  was  altogether  genuine.  We  i 
continually  find  in  Mr.  Moore  a  desire  to 
lose  himself  in  some  worship.  In  Mr. 
Yeats,  in  Gaelic,  in  Protestantism,  but  we 
always  suspect  that  at  the  back  of  his 
mind  he  was  well  aware  that  he  could  never 
unfasten  himself  from  his  own  moorings 
and  that  he  had  always  this  feeling,  "  If  I 
cannot  lose  myself  I  shall  at  least  not  lose 
art,  and  in  the  end  it  all  produces  copy." 
The  story  of  the  spoliation  of  Edward 
Martyn  in  "  The  Bending  of  the  Bough " 
has  been  told  with  absolute  frankness  by 
Mr.  Moore  in  the  Trilogy.  I  should  have 
more  confidence  in  the  shame  for  the  theft 
that  he  expresses  there  if  he  had  not  used 
the  shame  as  he  uses  every  asset  of  emotion 
he  possesses  for  literary  purposes.  Edward 
Martyn's  genuine  dramatic  talent  proved  in 
"  The  Heather  Field  "  was  a  temptation  to 
a  born  literary  bandit  like  Mr.  Moore,  who 
prides  himself  on  yielding  to  temptation, 
and  in  alliance  with  Mr.  Yeats,  always  an 
unfortunate  conjunction,  Edward  Martyn's 
play  was  tortured  from  its  original  inten- 

103 


GEORGE  MOORE 


, 


tion  and  became  no  play  at  all,  but  a 
dramatic  experiment  doomed  to  failure. 
Mr.  Moore  would  fain  have  captured  also 
Miss  Alice  Milligan's  "  Last  Feast  of  the 
Fianna,"  but  she  defended  it  "  like  a  little 
white  Persian  cat  spitting  at  him  from  the 
corner,"  as  he  himself  described  her  ;  very 
wisely  trusting  to  her  own  talents,  her  con- 
fidence being  justified  in  the  result. 

After  "The  Bending  of  the  Bough,"  Mr. 
Moore  broke  up  his  association  with  Irish 
drama  and  with  Mr.  Yeats,  and  looked  round 
for  other  partners.  He  came  to  Ireland 
with,  I  think,  a  sincere  belief  in  the  literary 
potencies  implicit  in  the  Gaelic  League.  He 
may  have  cherished  a  faint  ambition  to 
learn  the  language,  but  as  all  his  friends 
tell  us  it  took  him  many  years  to  acquire 
any  facility  even  in  English,  he  was  no 
doubt  deterred  from  the  more  complex 
tongue  of  the  Gael.  But  he  was  willing  to 
learn  Gaelic  vicariously,  through  his  nephews, 
and  he  was  very  firm  in  his  determination 
that  they  should  miss  none  of  the  accents 
and  elisions  of  the  wiliest  speech  in  Europe. 
But  though  he  did  not  learn  Irish  he  felt 
that  Irish  had  much  to  learn  from  him,  and 
he  placed  at  the  disposal  of  the  Gaelic 
League  the  name  and  fame  and  talents  of  a 
great  English  novelist  and  the  best-paid 
writer  upon  art  of  his  generation.  He  wrote 
"  The  Untilled  Field  "  that  Gaelic  Ireland 

104 


GEORGE  MOORE 


might  feel  its  way  into  modern  literature, 
and  no  doubt  if  he  had  been  more  careful 
of  Irish  susceptibilities  some  small  seed  of 
naturalism  might  have  fructified  in  Irish 
soil,  which  was  not  unkindly  just  then  to 
the  reception  of  new  influences.  He  had 
lived  too  long  out  of  Ireland  to  realise  that 
a  Gaelic  public  has  the  tenderest  toes.  It 
has  in  fact  cultivated  its  susceptibilities  into 
a  fine  art,  believing  that  its  salvation  lay 
in  them ;  Moore's  lightest  footstep  pro- 
duced anguish.  Causes  in  Ireland  are  strange 
creatures,  tender  and  fierce  ;  many  of  them 
die  in  childhood  or  perhaps  the  world  might 
harden  them.  The  Gaelic  League,  an  ador- 
able cause  for  an  Irishman,  has  not  escaped 
this  touchiness.  Had  it  not  possessed  a 
leader  who  like  Douglas  Hyde  knew  no 
fear,  it  too  had  died  in  infancy.  But  his 
splendid  courage  swung  it  through  the  perils 
of  infancy  and  adolescence ;  the  pity  is  that 
in  its  most  freakish  age  it  developed  an  ill- 
timed  and  ill-directed  boldness  and  dis- 
pensed with  the  leadership  of  a  man  of 
genius  in  whom  lay  its  only  hope  of  cap- 
turing all  Ireland.  I  sometimes  wonder  if 
anything  now  remains  for  what  was,  without 
question,  at  one  time  one  of  the  biggest 
possibilities  in  Irish  life,  but  a  gradual 
sinking  back  into  that  academic  stage  which 
in  a  language  precedes  decay  and  death. 
In    Ireland    more    perhaps    than    in    other 

105 


GEORGE  MOORE 


places,  a  movement  needs  a  man.  "  The 
Untilled  Field  "  even  in  a  Gaelic  translation 
did  not  capture  Gaelic  Ireland.  Though 
there  was  something  in  its  mood  that  might 
have  tempted  Gaels,  I  am  not  surprised  at 
its  failure.  Mr.  Moore's  meat  for  babes  con- 
tained some  elements  that  might  have  taxed 
stomachs  inured  to  stronger  diet  than  any 
Gaelic  Leaguer  ever  encountered.  So  like 
another  of  his  name,  "  There  was  trouble 
on  George,  Ireland  would  not  do  his  business 
for  him,"  and  the  Gaelic  League,  like  others 
of  his  Irish  aspirations,  went  into  the  melt- 
ing pot  of  the  Trilogy. 


106 


XIV 

Mr.  Moore  after  this,  I  think,  rested  from 
movements  and  became  in  more  than  one 
sense  in  Dublin  a  society  entertainer.  There 
has  always  been  in  him  a  trace  of  the  Donny- 
brook  Fair  Irishman  and  in  his  relations 
with  society  in  Dublin  these  characteristics 
frequently  appear.  The  following  episode 
of  the  green  hall  door  illustrates  this  : 
There  are  certain  people  in  Dublin  the  desire 
to  shock  whom  must  have  been  irresistible 
to  one  of  Mr.  Moore's  temperament,  for 
Dublin  has  other  and  more  inexcusable 
susceptibilities  than  those  of  Gaelic  Leaguers. 
There  are  respectable  Irish  people  who  have 
a  morbid  horror  of  anything  they  consider 
"  unsound  "  either  in  religion  or  politics. 
These  persons  are  often,  though  by  no 
means  always,  our  Protestants  and  Tories, 
who  could  better  pardon  open  immoralities 
than  the  "  unsoundness  "  I  speak  of.  I  N^ 
feel  quite  sure  that  these  persons  thought 
Mr.  Moore  a  very  bad  man,  but  they  might 
have  winked  at  his  badness  alone— robust 
virtue  is  ever  tender  to  robust  vice— but 
there  was  an  element  in  Mr.  Moore's  badness 
which  made  it  unpardonable  in  the  eyes  of 
true    blue    Protestant    Tories— he    truckled 

107 


GEORGE  MOORE 


with  Fenianism.  The  more  a  movement  in 
Ireland  proclaims  itself  non-political  and 
non-sectarian,  the  more  your  true  blue  of 
every  section  suspects  it.  To  be  a  Gaelic 
Leaguer  was  to  be  a  Fenian,  and  when  such 
a  one  painted  his  hall  door  in  the  Fenian 
colour  green,  what  was  this  but  an  open 
flaunting  of  his  abominable  sympathies  in  a 
respectable  neighbourhood.  All  Ely  Place 
rebelled,  letters  were  written  by  neighbours 
to  his  landlord.  The  occasion  was  one  after 
his  own  heart  and  Mr.  Moore  rushed  into 
the  fray  with  a  letter  to  his  landlord,  which, 
I  am  told,  ran  somewhat  as  follows  :  Mr. 
Moore  said  he  was  glad  his  neighbours  had 
complained  first  about  him  because  he  had 
grave  complaints  to  make  of  their  conduct, 
only  being  a  peaceable  man  he  did  not  wish 
to  say  anything;  but  now  that  they  had 
begun  the  attack,  he  would  say  that  his 
neighbours  did  not  clean  their  chimneys 
and  that  large  smuts  the  size  of  sixpenny 
pieces  floated  through  his  windows  and  on 
to  his  clean  doorstep.  His  neighbours  also 
kept  dogs  which  they  beat  with  sticks,  and 
these  dogs  howled,  which  was  distressing  to 
a  man  of  humane  feelings.  The  young 
ladies,  his  neighbours,  were  noisy  persons 
who  rode  their  bicycles  round  and  round 
before  his  door,  ringing  their  bells  and  look- 
ing at  his  hall  door,  which  they  objected 
to,  and  into  his  windows,  which  he  objected 

108 


GEORGE  MOORE 


to.  But  he  would  let  that  pass  and  come  to 
the  matter  of  the  hall  door.  He  would  like 
to  remind  his  landlord  that  he  was  George 
Moore,  whose  opinion  on  matters  of  taste 
was  more  highly  paid  than  that  of  any  other 
person  in  these  islands,  and  he  was  not 
accustomed  to  find  his  opinion  on  such 
matters  disputed.  But  he  would  let  that 
pass  also  ;  he  was  a  peaceable  person  and 
was  willing  to  agree  on  a  new  colour  for  the 
hall  door  after  mutual  consultation.  But 
he  would  like  to  remind  them  that  the  green 
hall  door  was  the  key-note  of  the  melody 
of  colour  in  the  whole  house,  and  the  colour 
prepared  one  for  the  harmonies  which  un- 
folded room  by  room.  As  his  landlord  was 
a  practical  business  man  he  would  know  that 
such  harmonies  were  expensive  things,  but 
still  for  the  sake  of  peace  he  was  prepared 
to  evolve  a  fresh  harmony  on  a  new  key- 
note, the  landlord  of  course  bearing  the 
expense.  He  did  not  know  which  of  his 
neighbours  had  made  the  complaint,  so  he 
was  sending  copies  of  the  letter  to  all,  and 
if  they  were  not  satisfied  he  would  write  to 
the  Press  and  ask  the  public  to  judge  between 
his  green  hall  door  and  the  dirty  white  of  the 
hall  doors  of  his  neighbours.  Mr.  Moore's  in- 
vitation was  not,  as  we  may  imagine,  accepted 
— and  his  hall  door  remained  an  oasis  of  ten- 
der green  in  the  desert  of  Ely  Place. 

On   another    occasion,    to   which    I   have 
109 


GEORGE  MOORE 


referred  in  an  earlier  chapter,  Mr.  Moore's 
cook  served  him  with  an  unsuccessful  ome- 
lette. Mr.  Moore  had  often  explained  to  his 
friends  that  his  tastes  in  food  were  very 
simple,  that  just  as  Whistler  had  narrowed 
down  his  colours  to  a  couple  of  tones,  so  he 
had  narrowed  down  his  carnal  appetites  to 
a  couple  of  dishes — an  omelette — but  it 
must  be  properly  made,  a  chop — but  it 
must  be  properly  cooked.  Six  cooks  within 
a  fortnight  failed  to  minister  to  this  modest 
appetite,  and  Mr.  Moore's  indignation  in  all 
probability  rose  higher  and  higher  at  suc- 
cessive failures,  till  it  came  to  pass  that  the 
last  of  the  six  went  out  to  get  a  policeman  to 
protect  her  from  a  flood  of  artistic  expos- 
tulation with  her  cooking  wherewith  Mr. 
Moore  threatened  to  engulf  her.  Mr.  Moore 
met  the  policeman  on  the  doorstep,  took 
him  by  the  arm  and  dragged  him  into  the 
dining-room,  pointed  to  the  omelette  and 
asked  in  a  tragic  voice,  "  Am  I  to  be  com- 
pelled by  law  to  eat  this  ?  "  That  his  tastes 
were  really  modest  is  shown  by  the  fact 
that  the  seventh  cook  proved  capable  of 
evoking  from  her  materials  the  exact  tones 
required  by  Mr.  Moore,  and  she  remained 
with  him  ten  or  twelve  years.  There  is  a 
distinction  between  flavours,  and  as  Walter 
Pater,  Mr.  Moore's  ancient  master  in  the 
art  of  writing,  says,  "  To  miss  the  sense  of 
distinction  is  to  miss  success  in  life." 

no 


GEORGE  MOORE 


The  conversion  of  George  Moore  to  religion 
was  an  event  which  interested  the  Dublin 
that  goes  to  the  Abbey  Theatre  and  enjoys 
good  acting  and  literary  art,  for  the  con- 
version was  conceived  in  the  mood  of  light 
comedy.  It  was  reported  that  the  ecclesi- 
astical authorities  at  Maynooth,  on  the 
occasion  of  the  late  King's  visit  there, 
decorated  that  seat  of  divinity  with  the 
King's  racing  colours.  This  may  or  may  not 
have  been  so,  but  at  the  moment  the  account 
appeared,  religion  came  to  George  Moore. 
His  conversion  was  as  instantaneous  as 
St.  Paul's,  and  no  doubt  his  experiences  en- 
abled him  later  on  to  understand  the  Apostle 
who  is  the  hero  of  "The  Brook  Kerith." 
It  is  possible  that  the  light  which  fell  from 
Heaven  on  Moore  was  in  the  nature  of  a 
literary  inspiration,  and  he  saw  as  in  a 
vision  the  book  which  he,  a  Messiah,  should 
write  about  an  Apostle.  "  Ave,  Salve  and 
Vale  "  occupied  him  at  the  moment  and  it 
was  needful  that  "The  Brook  Kerith" 
should  be  postponed  for  a  few  years.  But 
the  wise  litterateur  while  working  at  one 
book  will  prepare  his  life  for  the  next  and 
will  be  collecting  experiences.  So  George 
Moore  as  a  prologue  to  the  comedy  of  his 
religion,  at  once  wrote  to  the  papers  and 
announced  his  intended  reception  into  the 
Protestant  communion  as  a  protest  against 
the    decoration    of    Maynooth    with    King 

111 


GEORGE  MOORE 


Edward's  racing  colours.  The  chorus  in 
Dublin,  in  a  mood  rightly  related  to  the 
mind  of  the  protagonist,  commented  gaily 
upon  the  spiritual  state  of  one  whose  pro- 
test against  a  King  took  the  surprising  form 
of  adopting  the  religion  of  that  King  against 
whom  he  protested.  Mr.  Moore  desired 
complete  initiation  into  the  mysteries  of  his 
new  faith.  He  had  his  revelation,  but 
revelation  has  to  be  reconciled  to  human 
reason,  and  so  he  went  to  the  Archbishop  of 
Dublin  demanding  as  candidate  the  rites  of 
initiation.  The  Archbishop  was  wiser  than 
he  looked,  and  referred  Mr.  Moore  to  the 
rector  of  his  parish,  and  so  probably  escaped 
an  immortality,  which  I  am  certain  he 
would  not  have  desired,  in  the  pages  of  the 
Trilogy.  The  Archbishop  made  the  escape 
of  his  life,  for  it  was  suggested  by  the 
chorus  that  Mr.  Moore  was  trying  to  kill 
two  birds  with  the  one  stone.  He  hoped  to 
destroy  one  religion  by  explaining  his  reasons 
for  leaving  it  and  another  by  explaining  his 
\  reasons  for  joining  it. 

His  preference  for  Protestantism  was  based 
on  the  belief  that  Protestant  clergymen  were 
men  of  the  world.  This  view  he  explained 
to  "  iE,"  who  expostulated  with  him  for 
carrying  his  joke  too  far,  and  who  said 
Moore  would  hurt  the  feelings  of  men  who 
were  really  sincere  and  pious.  "  Oh  no, 
e  M9*  you  don't  understand  ;   these  men  are 

112 


/ 


GEORGE  MOORE 


men  of  the  world."  "But  I  tell  you,  Moore, 
that  I  know  many  of  these  men  and  they  are 
truly  sincere  and  believe  what  they  preach, 
and  they  will  ask  you  to  pray,  Moore,  to  go 
down  on  your  knees,  Moore,  things  you 
have  never  done  in  your  life,  and  you  will 
feel  very  much  out  of  place."  "  Oh  no, 
'  i£,5  you  don't  understand  ;  these  are  men 
of  the  world,  they  understand  perfectly." 
"  Well,  I  warn  you,"  said  "  iE,"  and  departed. 
After  a  week  had  elapsed  "  M  "  met  Mr. 
Moore  and  asked  him  about  the  initiation. 
6  Well,"  said  Moore,  "  what  you  said  nearly 
burst  up  the  whole  thing.  When  the  clergy- 
man came  I  did  not  wish  to  appear  to  be 
taken  in  too  easily  and  I  worked  up  a  few 
remaining  scruples,  fenced  for  a  while  and 
finally  announced  my  scruples  as  conquered, 
and  myself  ready  to  be  received  into  the 
fold.  Then  the  clergyman  said,  c  Let  us  have 
a  prayer,'  and  I  remembered  your  words 
and  saw  your  face  looking  at  me  and  I 
burst  out  laughing.  When  I  saw  the  horri- 
fied look  in  the  clergyman's  face  I  realised 
it  was  all  up  unless  I  could  convince  him 
that  it  was  hysteria,  and  I  clasped  my 
hands  together  and  said,  '  Oh,  you  don't 
realise  how  strange  all  this  appears  to 
me  to  be.  I  feel  like  a  little  child  that 
has  lost  its  way  on  a  long  road  and  at  last 
sees  its  father,'  and  I,  folding  my  hands 
anew,  began  4  Our  Father.'    I  took  the  wind 

H  113 


GEORGE  MOORE 


out  of  his  sails  that  way,  for  he  had  to  join 
in,  but  he  got  in  two  little  prayers  on  his 
own  account  afterwards,  and  very  nice  little 
prayers  they  were  too." 

This  little  child  in  religion  had  the  en- 
thusiasm of  the  newly  converted.  He  has 
told  us  how  he  began  to  read  the  Bible  for 
the  first  time,  and  he  went  so  far  as  to  read 
the  Lessons  in  a  country  church  in  England 
where  he  was  on  a  visit.  "  I  believe  in 
Protestantism,"  he  said  to  "  iE,"  "  I  don't 
mind  what  anybody  thinks."  Then  he  added, 
looking  slyly  at  "  M9"  as  an  afterthought : 
"  I  don't  think  I  could  go  on  reading  the 
Lessons  if  Mallock  came  into  the  church." 

When  Ireland  was  rent  in  two  over  the 
prospect  of  Home  Rule,  Mr.  Moore  trailed 
not  a  red  herring,  but  a  rarer  fish  across  its 
path  when  he  informed  his  country,  through 
the  contentious  columns  of  the  Irish  Times, 
that  in  the  restaurant  of  one  Henri  in  Paris 
he  had  eaten  a  grey  mullet.  The  bones  of 
that  mullet,  to  be  sure,  stuck  in  Ireland's 
throat,  but  it  was  still  articulate  enough  to 
talk,  and  for  days  every  shade  of  religion  and 
politics  in  the  country  told  the  Irish  Times 
what  it  thought  of  mullet  and  how  often  it 
had  eaten  it  in  every  colour  from  grey  to 
scarlet.  Besides  the  mullet  matter,  Mr. 
Moore  trailed  his  coat  in  letters  to  the 
papers  on  every  variety  of  subject,  irrelevant 
if  possible  to  any  event  or  emotion  of  the 

114 


GEORGE  MOORE 


day,  and  but  seldom  trailed  it  in  vain. 
Someone  was  always  found  to  respond  to 
the  invitation,  and  Dublin  waxed  merry 
over  the  encounters,  and  learned  to  like 
Mr.  Moore  more  in  his  character  of  jester 
than  of  patriot ;  so  pleasantly  did  he,  like 
Bottom,  put  an  ass's  head  upon  him  and 
gambol  in  our  walks. 


115 


XV 


Mr.  Moore  having  written  a  book  in 
which  he  said  his  farewells  to  Dublin  with 
all  the  literary  skill  at  his  command,  could 
hardly  remain  here  when  the  book  was 
published.  So  he,  to  whom  sacrifice  had 
become  the  chief  ceremonial  of  his  religion 
as  an  artist,  tore  himself  away  from  a  charm- 
ing house  and  a  lively  company  of  agreeable 
friends,  exchanging  the  soft  clean  airs  of 
Dublin  for  stuffy  Pimlico  where  is  distilled 
in  its  crudest  form  that  mixture  of  hot 
rubber  and  petrol  fumes  that  makes  all  the 
Londoners  know  of  atmosphere.  Mr. 
Moore's  contributions  to  literature  since 
his  return  to  London  have  been  lamentable. 
Casual  articles  in  newspapers  on  such  sub- 
jects as  whistling  for  taxicabs,  politics  and 
barking  dogs.  I  do  not,  I  confess,  think 
much  of  Mr.  Moore's  pronouncements  on 
the  last  subject,  and  but  that  I  am  committed 
to  a  statement  of  Mr.  Moore  as  an  Irishman, 
his  preoccupation  with  this  matter  would 
make  me  suspect  him  of  an  English  ancestry. 
I  have  often  been  struck  by  the  sensitive- 
ness of  elderly  military  and  naval  English- 
men in  the  matter  of  the  dogs'  protesting 

116 


GEORGE  MOORE 


voice.     Any  barking  that  is  to  be  done  in 
England  they  want  to  do  themselves. 

In  politics  Mr.  Moore  ranges  himself 
naturally  with  God  and  the  Daily  Mail  on 
the  side  of  the  big  battalions,  or,  as  they 
view  it  through  the  larger  other  end  of  their 
mental  opera  glasses,  the  side  of  the  small 
nationalities.  Mr.  Moore's  make-up,  how- 
ever, is  not  that  of  the  politician,  and  one 
is  not  surprised  to  find  him  an  echo.  The 
labour  of  his  mind  is  all  on  the  side  of  per- 
sonal expression,  and  he  has  none  of  the 
intellectual  adroitness  that  enables  the  poli- 
tician to  identify  his  own  cause  with  the 
cause  of  humanity.  Mr.  Moore  is  very 
clear  about  his  own  cause  and  never  hesi- 
tates to  hustle  other  causes  off  the  course. 
He  is  primitive,  indeed,  infantile  man,  as 
sure  of  himself  as  the  baby  is.  He  has 
escaped  all  that  sophistication  of  altruism 
wherewith  the  guardians  of  our  youth  so 
early  confound  our  confidence  in  ourselves. 
Masculine  character,  as  it  appears  to  the 
feminine  mind  weary  with  wisdom  from  its 
age-long  researches,  seldom  gets  beyond 
the  boyhood  stage,  and  our  Peter  Pans  are 
dear  to  us,  but  Mr.  Moore  has  never  got 
beyond  babyhood  in  his  character,  and  few 
women  can  have  known  him  long  without  that 
desire  to  slap  him  that  is  the  normal  woman's 
attitude  towards  an  aggravating  baby,  let 
the  sentimentalists  say  what  they  will. 

117 


GEORGE  MOORE 


I  do  not  find  Mr.  Moore's  essays  in  the 
Press  in  England  as  amusing  as  his  essays 
here.  Your  Englishman  being  a  born  senti- 
mentalist, like  his  German  forefathers,  will 
accept  no  statement  of  life  that  is  not 
practical.  To  get  a  footing  in  an  English 
paper  Mr.  Moore  was  constrained  to  link 
himself  on  to  such  obvious  nuisances  as 
taxi  whistling  fiends,  and  barking  dogs. 
Such  flinty  matters  can  kindle  a  spark  of 
rage,  but  out  of  them  no  pleasant  glow  of 
humour  comes.  Ireland,  sure  of  its  prac- 
ticality, and  unutterably  weary  of  it,  de- 
mands continual  imaginative  statements  of 
life.  The  colour  of  a  hall  door,  the  juxta- 
position of  a  policeman  and  an  omelette, 
the  mythical  flavour  of  a  mythical  mullet, 
mythically  eaten  in  a  French  restaurant, 
such  things  delight  us,  as  a  way  of  escape 
from  the  harsh  constraint  of  our  practical 
temperament.  Dr.  Mahaffy,  the  Provost  of 
Dublin  University,  is  more  concerned  that 
his  girl  students  should  not  wear  pink  blouses 
than  that  the  course  of  study  provided  by 
his  college  should  be  of  the  slightest  in- 
tellectual advantage  to  them,  and  all  Dublin 
is  with  him  in  a  hearty  appreciation  of  his 
attitude  and  does  not  care  a  hang  for  college 
courses.  The  merchants  of  Belfast,  owners 
of  as  fine  businesses  as  any  in  the  world, 
were  happier  running  guns  illicitly  than  they 
ever  were  in  reading  bulky  balance  sheets. 

118 


GEORGE  MOORE 


Your  Englishman,  conscious  of  his  danger 
on  the  sentimental  side  of  his  nature,  is,  in 
common  with  his  Teuton  relative,  armouring 
himself  on  that  side  more  heavily  day  by 
day.  I  need  not  talk  to  Irishmen  of  their 
danger  in  following  their  practical  bent,  we 
— and  England  also — know  it  very  well. 
Whether  we  are  right  in  regarding  life  as  a 
schoolmaster  with  a  rod  in  pickle  for  tempera- 
ment or  whether  we  are  wrong,  it  is  perhaps 
fortunate  for  literature,  and  it  is  certainly 
luck  for  the  student  of  Mr.  Moore's  wayward 
character,  that  he  never  went  to  school. 

Mr.  Moore  is  safely  installed  in  London 
now,  he  has  his  house  and  furniture,  mahog- 
any doors  and  pictures  and  all  the  burdens 
that  man  sets  himself  to  accumulate  in  his 
passage  through  time.  He  has  the  occasional 
society  of  Mr.  Tonks  and  Mr.  Steer  to  whet 
his  appetite  for  discussion  on  art.  His  ex- 
cursions into  print  have  not,  I  fancy, 
afforded  him  much  amusement,  for  irrelevant 
as  such  trifling  was  in  the  midst  of  an  agon- 
ising war,  they  were  too  much  in  the  key  of 
English  life  to  relieve  the  boredom  of  a 
nature  such  as  Mr.  Moore's,  which  loves  to 
strike  a  discord.  I  do  not  feel  that  Mr. 
Moore  is  as  at  home  in  the  picture  in  his 
London  life  as  he  was  in  Dublin.  His  opera 
hat  fits  in  there,  no  doubt,  and  his  bull-in- 
the-china-shop  truthfulness,  which  he  was 
diplomatic  enough  to  replace  in  Dublin  by 

119 


GEORGE  MOORE 


a  more  subtle  and  edged  sincerity,  probably 
serves  him  well  in  a  country  where  a  Bull  is 
the  popular  hero.  He  has  also  in  cold  storage 
in  his  nature,  like  most  Anglo-Irish  people, 
an  appreciation  of  the  well-oiled  English 
mechanism  of  life.  Yet  for  all  this  I  hardly 
think  that  one  who  has  never  written  Finis 
after  any  chapter  in  his  life  has  put  the  last 
seal  on  his  Irish  Chapter.  I  am  the  more 
inclined  to  think  this  because  there  were 
wafted  to  us  here  in  Dublin  from  time  to 
time  scraps  of  his  latest  book  "  The  Brook 
Kerith,"  and  although  he  has  made  a 
pilgrimage  to  the  Holy  Land  since  he  left 
us  the  tales  borne  to  me  bring  airs  from  Ely 
Place.  Mr.  Moore  came  to  Ireland  in  search 
of  a  Messiah,  and  though  having  tried  to  fit 
the  part  to  each  of  his  friends  here  and 
finding  they  failed  him  in  some  essential 
characteristic,  he  cast  himself  for  it,  he  can- 
not have  been  satisfied  with  his  own  pre- 
sentation of  the  part,  for  in  "  The  Brook 
Kerith,"  he  starts  the  quest  anew.  The 
story  of  the  successor  to  the  Messiahship 
has  not  yet  leaked  out,  but  Mr.  Moore 
presents  us  with  an  apostle  who  believes 
that  the  new  religion  will  not  succeed  unless 
it  is  associated  with  a  language  revival ; 
and  another  apostle  who  talks  about  style, 
pondering  over  his  Epistles  to  his  followers 
with  a  literary  anxiety  as  keen  as  Mr. 
Yeats'  !     I  believe  it  was  once  said  of  Mr. 

120 


GEORGE  MOORE 


Moore  by  a  member  of  his  family  that  he 
would  end  his  days  as  a  monk,  and  it  is 
certainly  true  that  his  later  writings  show 
the  attraction  of  religion  drawing  him  closer 
and  closer.  It  seems,  however,  to  be  an 
attraction  of  repulsion  and  to  consist  rather 
in  renunciations  than  confessions  of  faith.  v 
In  Dublin  he  renounced  St.  Peter.  In 
"The  Brook  Kerith  "  he  confesses  St.  Paul; 
but  doubtless  we  shall  have  a  renunciation 
there  also.  I  think  Mr.  Moore's  conten- 
tion that  his  family  is  of  Protestant  origin 
must  have  some  truth  in  it,  for  he  has  a 
good  deal  of  the  Protestant  protest  against 
faith  in  any  shape  or  form.  So  strong  is 
Mr.  Moore's  protest  against  all  that  relates 
to  the  See  of  Peter,  that  I  believe  amongst 
the  many  endings  he  proposed  for  his  book 
he  had  almost  chosen  the  following  :  "  You 
know,"  he  is  reported  to  have  said  to  a 
friend,  "  the  ordinary  legend  of  the  martyr- 
dom of  St.  Paul  I  discard  as  invented  by  a 
Church  who  wanted  a  long  background  of 
martyrs  to  justify  any  martyrdoms  she 
herself  should  inflict.  I  intend  to  bring  St. 
Paul  in  his  old  age  to  Spain,  where  he  gradu- 
ally fades  away  surrounded  by  his  disciples. 
At  the  very  last  he  hears  once  more  the 
Voice  he  heard  on  the  way  to  Damascus, 
and  a  light  penetrates  him  with  a  vision  of 
futurity  and  he  sees  with  horror  all  that  his 
religion  is  bringing  on  the  world.     He  sees 

121 


GEORGE  MOORE 


the  Inquisition  in  Spain  and  Maynooth  in 
Ireland,  and  he  dies  crying  with  all  the 
ferocity  peculiar  to  the  Pauline  nature,  "  To 
hell  with  the  Pope  !  " 

Mr.  Moore  is  too  good  an  artist  to  disfigure 
his  book  with  this  freakish  story,  and  too 
much  of  an  imp  not  to  whisper  it  in  some 
friend's  ear  with  a  confidence  which  has 
certainly  not  been  misplaced  in  the  perfect 
acoustic  properties  of  Dublin. 


122 


XVI 

A  man  who  suffered  so  much  for  religion  as 
actually  to  submit  to  pray  and  be  prayed 
over  would  not  shrink  from  further  sacrifices, 
and  after  "  Ave,  Salve  and  Vale  "  was  com- 
pleted the  idea  of  writing  a  story  about 
St.  Paul,  in  which  Moore's  own  experience 
as  a  propagandist  of  religion  would  be  in- 
valuable, laid  hold  of  him  and,  as  an  artist 
conscientious  about  details,  he  felt  he  must 
go  to  Palestine  as  he  went  to  Ireland  for 
local  colour.  No  doubt  not  a  scrap  of 
adventure  there  will  be  wasted  and  we  will 
get  it  all  in  some  future  tale.  But  he  has 
told  the  story  of  his  wanderings  to  his 
friends  so  fully,  that  they  have  got  all 
the  publicity  of  rumour  and  we  can  set 
some  of  them  down.  At  Marseilles  Mr. 
Moore  embarked  on  the  bluest  of  blue  seas. 
"  With  Marseilles,"  he  says,  "  my  quest 
really  began.  When  I  looked  on  those 
white  shores  rising  behind  me  out  of  the 
blue  water  into  the  twilight,  the  precipitous 
chalk  worn  and  corroded  by  the  wind  into 
battlements  and  parapets  and  towers,  re- 
minding the  beholder  of  Valhallas  builded 
by  gods  that  have  been — a  beautiful  phrase 

123 


GEORGE  MOORE 


of  William  Morris.  Those  phantasmal 
ghostly  shores  rising  steeply  out  of  the  wave 
with  not  a  blade  of  grass  enchanted  me  all 
through  the  lingering  twilight  until  they 
faded  as  the  vessel  passed  out  of  the  bay, 
and  suddenly  I  realised  where  I  was  and 
whither  we  were  hastening,  and  I  thought, 
*■  I'm  afloat  for  the  first  time  on  the  Mediter- 
ranean, that  sea,  around  whose  shores  all 
the  old  stories  sprang  up  like  flowers.' ' 

Mr.  Moore  was  so  enchanted  by  antique 
names  and  classical  memories  that  he  raved 
around  the  ship  to  callous  fellow  passengers. 
Here  was  Sicily,  where  the  naughtiest  idylls 
of  Theocritus  evoked  memories  he  would 
willingly  have  discussed  with  his  shrinking 
companions.  In  the  lands  about  this  inland 
sea  were  born  the  old  gods  and  especially 
the  goddesses,  Venus  foam  bright  rising  from 
the  waves  and  floating  shorewards  in  her 
shell,  Europa  and  the  Bull,  Proserpine 
gathering  daffodils  on  the  plains  of  Enna  — 
on  all  these  legends  he  dilated.  But,  alas, 
his  intoxication  with  classical  myth  fell  flat 
on  companions  who  desired  intoxication 
with  whiskey  and  soda,  and  were  more 
interested  in  a  volcano  in  eruption  than  in 
George  Moore  in  eruption.  Only  one  fellow 
passenger,  a  silent,  pleasant,  middle-aged 
man,  seemed  to  listen  to  Mr.  Moore  with 
interest.  He  did  not  talk  much  but  kept 
the  conversation  going.     Who  he  was,  Mr. 

124 


GEORGE  MOORE 


Moore  did  not  know  or  care.  He  was  a 
listener,  and  the  art  of  picturesque  conversa- 
tion did  not  rust  for  want  of  practice.  At 
Port  Said  Mr.  Moore  had  to  ship  for  Joppa, 
and  here  he  became  aware  of  a  sudden  in- 
crease in  respect  for  himself.  He  desired 
a  cabin  to  himself,  for  the  thought  of  being 
polite  to  a  fellow  passenger  horrified  him, 
but  a  cabin  was  a  difficult  thing  to  get ;  yet 
when  he  appeared  with  his  silent  companion, 
he  was  treated  as  if  he  were  an  Emperor. 
All  difficulties  were  smoothed  away.  Haroun 
Alraschid  could  hardly  have  passed  amid 
more  obsequious  subjects  than  did  George 
Moore,  wondering  at  the  way  people  ran 
to  do  him  service.  The  East  welcomed  a 
Messiah  from  Ireland,  what  did  it  all  mean  ? 
He  was  enchanted  if  puzzled.  He  tells  us 
that  on  the  Joppa  steamer  suddenly  looking 
into  the  hold  he  saw  the  East  in  all  its  sub- 
lime rags  :  turbans  and  burnouses,  long 
skirts  half  silk,  half  cotton,  in  divers 
colours,  sometimes  yellow  stripes  sometimes 
blue,  and  always  turbans,  with  veils  floating 
down  the  back,  and  fastened  with  coils  of  black 
camel's  hair  rope  round  the  head.  The  Syrian 
women  are  unveiled,  the  Mohammedans  all  in 
black.  There  were  Jews  and  a  rabbi,  a 
great  paunchy,  bearded  fellow  with  a  nose 
like  a  flag,  all  thrown  together  like  so  many 
cattle  and  sheep,  to  sleep  as  best  they  could 
on  their  own  rags,  and  there  were  plenty  of 

125 


GEORGE  MOORE 


these.  Every  moment  a  family  would  pull 
out  a  sack  and  drag  out  its  hoard  of  rags, 
and  then  put  them  back  for  no  reason  a 
European  could  understand.  The  Bedouins 
seemed  to  him  to  bear  the  sadness  of  sun- 
light, for  nothing,  Mr.  Moore  thinks,  is  so 
sad  as  the  sun,  and  the  sun-sodden  Bedouins 
seemed  to  him  sadder  than  any  Irish  tinker 
he  had  ever  seen. 

He  was  rowed  ashore  at  Joppa  in  a  great 
galley  like  a  Roman  barge,  twelve-oared, 
two  men  to  an  oar,  the  rowers  chanting 
their  boat  songs.  He  saw  Joppa  rising  steep 
from  the  sea,  house  after  house,  stretching 
away  east  and  west,  beautiful  in  outline, 
like  a  strung  bow,  one  minaret  above  all  — 
an  arrow  pointing  heavenwards.  He  stepped 
from  the  vessel  into  the  straggling  street,  for 
there  is  no  shore,  and  lo,  a  strange  cry  !  the 
symbol  of  the  East  appears,  a  camel,  swinging 
great  boxes  of  oranges  tiered  on  either  side, 
walking  with  a  melancholy  resignation  sur- 
passing that  of  any  saint's,  long  puritanical 
lips,  callous  tufted  hide,  the  anchorite  of 
the  desert,  the  nonconformist  of  the  four- 
footed  world  !  The  donkeys  were  beautiful, 
well  fed  and  would  gallop  ringing  their 
bells — all  unlike  the  Irish  donkeys,  sombre 
and  obstinate,  and  only  to  be  moved  by  a 
union  of  sticks  and  profanity.  Here  again 
the  hotel  melted  in  obsequiousness  to  George 
and   his   mysterious   companion,   and   so   it 

126 


GEORGE  MOORE 


was  all  the  way  to  Jerusalem.  Moore  was 
in  search  of  a  monastery  where  his  Essene 
monks  in  "  The  Brook  Kerith  "  could  be 
housed  and  he  wanted  to  ride  on  an  Arab 
horse.  He  refused  to  ride  on  English  ponies. 
Go  to  the  East  to  ride  on  English  ponies  ! 
He  must  have  an  Arab  horse.  There  were 
none,  only  the  Arab  draught  horses,  but 
still  the  magical  influence  prevailed.  They 
would  send  to  Damascus  for  an  Arab  steed 
for  George  !  Never  before  attended  with 
such  ready  service,  Moore  commented  on  it 
to  his  companion,  the  middle-aged  mystery 
who  went  with  him  to  Jerusalem.  "I  do 
not  know  who  you  are,"  he  said,  "  but  they 
treat  me  as  if  I  were  a  king."  "  My  name 
is  Frank  Cook,"  said  the  mystery,  mani- 
festing itself.  Alas,  it  was  not  the  splendour 
of  George  Moore's  genius  which  made  the 
East  to  bow  itself  before  him,  but  the  fact 
that  his  companion  was  the  great  Cook, 
the  Adept  who  conjures  tours  out  of  the 
strange  places  of  the  earth,  whose  presence 
had  caused  all  obstacles  to  melt. 

When  Mr.  Moore  found  that  Damascus 
was  a  long  way  from  Jerusalem  and  that 
he  would  have  to  wait  a  week  for  his  Arab 
horse,  he  determined  to  ride  anything  he 
could  get,  and  left  the  choice  of  horses  to 
the  dragoman.  And  here  Nature  who,  in 
the  words  of  Whistler,  "  is  creeping  up  " 
to  art,  brought  together  for  this  new  Don 

127 


GEORGE  MOORE 


Quixote  all  the  materials  that  had  been  used 
so  successfully  for  the  old.  For  the  drago- 
man, a  gaunt  hungry-looking  Arab,  ap- 
peared next  day  mounted  on  a  lean  roan 
that  would  not,  Mr.  Moore  says,  have 
reminded  him  of  Rosinante  but  that  it  was 
accompanied  by  a  small  bay  pony  !  Nature 
had  brought  all  the  players  together,  but 
she  had  juggled  the  parts,  giving  the  drago- 
man Rosinante  and  casting  George  for  the 
part  of  Sancho  Panza.  One  sighs  for  the 
grotesque  pencil  of  Gustave  Dore  to  make  a 
picture  of  such  a  party,  to  show  the  plump 
silhouette  of  Sancho  on  the  little  bay 
ambling  along  the  peaks  of  Moab.  Prob- 
ably Mr.  Moore  said  to  himself,  "  A  Messiah 
dare  not  give  any  opportunities  to  the  carica- 
turist ;  public  men,  yes,  emperors,  yes,  but 
Messiahs,  never  !  "  So  as  he  had  cast  him- 
self for  the  part  of  hero,  he  could  not  allow 
nature  to  divert  him  from  his  purpose  and 
start  him  on  the  great  errand  of  his  life  in 
such  ignoble  shape.  He  insisted  on  return- 
ing to  the  stables  and  exchanging  the  little 
bay  pony  for  the  gaunt  Arab  draught 
horse,  that  was  to  goose-step  him  relentlessly 
with  military  precision  to  the  top  of  every 
mountain  and  the  depth  of  every  ravine 
between  Jerusalem  and  Jericho,  till  each 
several  bone  in  George's  body  shrieked  for 
mercy.  He  got  riding-breeches  made  of 
some  terrible  material  such  as  people  might 

128 


GEORGE  MOORE 


make  sails  out  of.  Those  terrible  breeches, 
those  wooden  horses,  the  heat,  the  insects, 
the  precipices  he  had  to  climb,  fainting, 
searching  along  the  Jordan  and  through 
Moab  and  by  the  Dead  Sea  for  a  monastery. 
His  horse  would  not  trot ;  if  it  was  beaten 
it  kicked  ;  it  would  attempt  the  exploit  of 
buck-jumping  on  the  edge  of  precipices.  It 
conquered  its  rider.  At  last  after  many 
monasteries,  too  unromantic  for  the  pur- 
poses of  the  tale,  were  visited,  on  turning 
the  shoulder  of  a  mountain  one  was  dis- 
covered perched  half-way  up  a  precipice  over 
a  valley  and  below  was  the  Brook  Kerith  ! 
Moore  is  not  an  adept  at  climbing  and  he 
had  been  days  in  the  saddle  and  was  sore 
in  every  atom,  but  religion  is  a  great  power, 
and  at  last  he  climbed  to  his  rock  monastery. 
He  subsided  at  last  crying,  "  My  God,  my 
bones,  my  bones!"  So  tired  was  he  that 
when  he  saw  a  woman  there  among  the 
monks  he  did  not  even  enquire  what  she 
was  doing  there.  "  You  need  say  no  more," 
said  a  witty  woman  who  listened  to  George's 
account  of  his  fatigues.  "  If  you  saw  a 
woman  in  a  monastery  and  did  not  enquire 
as  to  the  cause  of  her  presence  there,  you 
were  indeed  tired."  There  in  some  antique 
valley  in  the  neighbourhood  of  Jericho  is  the 
monastery  of  the  Essenes  of  the  Brook 
Kerith.  To  placate  the  Abbot,  George 
prayed  for  the  second  time  in  his  life,  or 
i  129 


GEORGE  MOORE 


pretended  to  pray,  in  the  rock  cell  where 
Elijah  was  fed  by  the  ravens.  We  hear 
rumours  of  mountain  climbing  to  which,  I 
believe,  "  J3,"  who  has  had  experience  of 
Mr.  Moore's  capacity  as  a  mountaineer, 
listens  with  a  sceptical  ear,  remembering 
that  George  Moore  could  not  get  a  quarter 
of  the  way  up  Slieve  Gullion,  and  he  doubts 
in  a  hotter  climate  these  ascents  of  precipices 
wild  and  gigantic  as  those  in  a  Dore  land- 
scape. "  M,"  I  am  told,  suggests  that  Mr. 
Moore's  dragoman  or  his  draught  horse 
carried  him  or  pushed  him  through  these 
wild  adventures.  As  for  the  rest  of  the  acts 
and  adventures  of  this  apostle,  are  they  not 
written  in  "  The  Brook  Kerith  "  ? 


130 


XVII 

"  The  Brook  Kerith  "  is  the  story  of  Jesus 
of  Nazareth,  whom  Mr.  Moore  represents  as 
a  shepherd  belonging  to  a  brotherhood  of 
Essenes  living  in  a  great  settlement  on  the 
eastern  bank  of  Jordan.  Led  by  his  medita- 
tions among  the  mountains  where  he  fed 
his  flock  to  believe  that  nothing  should 
come  between  the  soul  and  God,  Jesus  went 
to  be  baptised  of  John  the  Baptist  and  his 
baptism  developed  in  him  a  fury  of  desire  to 
save  his  people  from  the  tyranny  of  the 
priests.  This  led  him  to  Jerusalem.  On  the 
charge  of  threatening  to  destroy  the  Temple 
there,  which  was  sustained  by  his  actual 
eviction  of  the  money-changers  by  physical 
force,  and  also  of  attempted  blasphemy  in 
equalling  himself  to  God,  he  was,  by  priestly 
instigation,  crucified  by  the  Romans.  Ap- 
parently dead,  he  was  removed  from  the 
cross  by  his  devoted  friend  Joseph  of  Arima- 
thsea,  who  placed  him  in  his  own  new  tomb. 
Jesus  was  not  dead,  and  was  restored  to 
health  by  Esora,  Joseph's  ancient  nurse. 
He  is  taken  back  by  Joseph  to  the  Brook 
Kerith,  the  monastery  where  his  former 
brethren  the  Essenes  had  settled,  and  there 

131 


GEORGE  MOORE 


he  is  restored  to  his  task  as  shepherd  of 
their  flocks.  Wandering  again  among  the 
hills,  he  came  to  healing  of  his  mind,  shat- 
tered as  it  has  been  by  his  terrible  experi- 
ences. After  many  years  when  Jesus  was 
coming  to  himself,  Paul  the  Apostle  being 
persecuted  by  the  Jews  takes  refuge  at 
the  Brook  Kerith  and  is  there  confronted 
by  Jesus,  on  the  story  of  whose  death  and 
resurrection  he  had  staked  all  his  hopes  and 
founded  many  Christian  churches.  Paul 
refuses  to  admit  to  his  mind  the  truth  of 
Jesus'  story  and  leaves  the  monastery  with 
Jesus  as  his  guide  to  Csesarea.  Paul  wraps 
firmly  round  him  his  belief  in  his  own 
Apostleship  which  had  been  conferred  on 
him  in  vision  from  a  Christ  in  heaven,  and 
puts  away  from  him  as  delusion  the  real 
Jesus  and  the  teaching  he  would  have  given 
him.  Jesus  leaves  Paul  in  safety  near 
Csesarea,  and  we  have  a  momentary  passage 
across  the  stage  of  some  Buddhist  monks, 
when  Jesus  disappears  from  our  view,  while 
Paul  pursues  his  journey  to  Csesarea  and 
finally  to  Rome. 

The  rumours  that  had  reached  us  in 
Dublin  of  "  The  Brook  Kerith,"  were  many  of 
them  dispersed  for  me  when  I  read  the  book 
itself.  I  was  reminded  for  an  instant — so 
do  trivial  matters  arise  uninvited  in  the 
mind  during  its  most  serious  occupations  — 
of  those  suggestions,  to  which  I  have  referred 

132 


GEORGE  MOORE 


before,  made  by  Mr.  Yeats  to  Mr.  Moore 
when  together  they  fashioned  the  play  of 
"  Dermiud  and  Grania."  The  first  act, 
Mr.  Yeats  said,  should  be  "  horizontal." 
Mr.  Moore  was  puzzled  at  that  time  by  Mr. 
Yeats'  geometrical  language,  but  I  think  he 
must  have  since  gone  profoundly  into  this 
matter,  for  in  "  The  Brook  Kerith  "  we  have 
a  book  that  might  be  described  as  horizontal 
for  the  first  442  pages,  rising  suddenly  then 
into  one  vertical  peak  and  subsiding  at 
page  466  to  the  horizontal  again  and  con- 
tinuing at  this  level  up  to  its  close  on  page 
471. 

It  is  perhaps  a  tribute  to  Mr.  Moore's 
power  of  transporting  us  to  the  East  where 
he  has  laid  the  scenes  of  his  story,  that  when 
one  attempts  to  criticise  "  The  Brook 
Kerith,"  one  is  led  into  a  labyrinth  of 
tropes  and  images  that  are  more  in  the  nature 
of  eastern  than  of  western  literature.  I 
might  call  "  The  Brook  Kerith  "  a  recital 
in  a  musical  undertone  such  as  those  that 
beguiled  "  The  Arabian  Nights  "  ;  the  voice 
is  never  raised,  the  key  never  altered  save 
in  that  moment  when  Paul  talks  noisily  to 
Jesus  on  the  road  to  Caesarea,  and  then  the 
tones  fall  again  into  a  murmur.  I  might 
say  that  the  book  represents  a  space  of 
time  filled  with  momentous  happenings  that 
yet  fall  silently  as  the  sand  in  the  hour-glass, 
and  for  all  their  meaning,  there  remains  for 

133 


GEORGE  MOORE 


us  in  the  end  but  a  little  mound  of  sand. 
Mr.  Moore  has  been  at  extraordinary  pains 
to  hush  all  sound  in  the  book.  "  Down, 
down,"  he  says  to  every  fawning  fancy  that 
leaps  up  to  his  hand.  "  To  heel,  to  heel," 
he  says  to  any  passionate  emotion  that 
threatens  to  overleap  the  bounds  he  set  it. 
And  perhaps  he  has  done  wisely.  In  at- 
tempting to  retell  the  story  of  the  Gospels 
he  subjected  himself  to  a  tremendous  ordeal, 
and  that  he  has  emerged  from  it  with  any 
credit  at  all,  is  a  high  tribute  to  his  art  as  a 
writer. 

I  remember  that  John  Eglinton  says  in 
one  of  his  essays  that  "  no  one  could  im- 
prove upon  the  story  of  David,  unless,  by 
a  miracle,  he  could  introduce  some  new  and 
transforming  element  into  his  conception 
of  it."  He  says  that  "  when  a  great  legend 
or  narrative  comes  down  to  us  from  anti- 
quity— as,  for  instance,  the  Biblical  story  of 
David  — it  does  so  in  a  certain  form  in  which 
it  has  spontaneously  clothed  itself  and  which 
fits  it  as  the  body  fits  the  soul."  The  story 
of  the  Son  of  David  had  behind  it  more  than 
a  thousand  years  of  marvelling  worship  be- 
fore our  English  translators  wove  it  into  the 
amazing  literature  we  know  to-day.  He 
who  would  part  such  a  garment  undertakes 
a  terrific  task.  His  tale  must  inevitably 
seem  to  compete  with  the  scripture  story  — 
that  unequalled  epic  that  begins  with  the 

134 


GEORGE  MOORE 


Birth  that  is  coincident  with  the  birth  of  a 
new  star  in  space,  and  that  goes  on,  every 
line  a  phrase  of  music,  to  tell  of  Him  who 
shall  lead  humanity,  sickened  with  the  bitter 
fruit  of  Eden,  to  the  healing  tree  that  springs 
up  in  the  street  of  that  Holy  City  that  is 
built  about  the  throne  of  God.  Who  shall 
worthily  re-sing  that  song  that  note  by 
note  has  sung  itself  into  every  event  of  life 
and  death  of  centuries  of  English-speaking 
Christians,  so  that  many  of  us  hardly  know 
now  if  it  is  the  story,  or  the  manner  of  its 
telling,  that  enchants  us  ? 

Mr.  Moore  brings  upon  his  head  also  the 
reproach  Plato  put  upon  the  poets  who 
brought  the  gods  into  disrepute,  making  the 
heavenly  story  common,  bringing  the  eso- 
teric teaching  of  the  mysteries  down  to  such 
materialistic  tales  as  confront  us  to-day  in 
the  pages  of  the  classical  dictionary. 

One  opens  such  a  book  as  "  The  Brook 
Kerith  "  fearing  that  the  morbus  pediculosis 
that  so  often  afflicts  the  realistic  writer  may 
leave  its  unclean  trace  on  the  spotless  tale 
our  Bible  gave  us.  But  Mr.  Moore  has  been 
saved  from  this  horrible  ending  to  his  literary 
career.  It  seems  to  me  in  reading  the  book, 
that  instead  of  taking  the  story  in  his  own 
hands  and  carrying  it  his  own  way,  the  story 
took  him  and  carried  him  whither  it  would. 

Joseph  of  Arimathsea,  whose  life  the 
Bible  dismisses  almost  in  a  phrase,  is  the 

135 


GEORGE  MOORE 


man  whose  spiritual  struggle  occupies  the 
greater  portion  of  "  The  Brook  Kerith." 
If  a  book  so  still  could  be  said  to  have  any 
motion  one  might  divide  the  tale  into  three 
movements.  The  Joseph  movement,  slow 
and  languid,  which  merges  into  the  more 
solemn  movement  of  the  Messiah's  story, 
and  the  Pauline  discord  which  twangs  out 
noisily  before  the  murmuring  close.  Joseph 
of  Arimathaea's  quest  is  Mr.  Moore's  own 
quest,  and  one  must  regret  that  one  who 
has  shown  in  this  book,  with  an  art  few 
writers  possess,  the  passionate  desire  for 
worship  that  starts  the  human  heart  on  so 
many  restless  pilgrimages,  should  himself 
seem  to  be  so  satisfied  that  all  his  own 
quests  shall  end  in  the  discovery  of  a  happy 
phrase.  This  may  be  an  unjust  estimate  of 
Mr.  Moore,  and  it  may  seem  absurd  to  bring 
a  moral  issue  into  a  literary  criticism,  but 
I,  in  common  with  most  women,  can  only 
separate  the  intellectual  question  from  the 
moral  one  with  extreme  difficulty,  nor  can 
I  follow  Mr.  Moore  in  his  extraordinary 
preoccupation  with  what  seems  to  me  the 
mere  scaffolding  of  life.  I  may  be  captured 
by  the  happy  phrase,  but  I  cannot  rest  in 
it  with  any  lasting  satisfaction. 

I  cannot  help  being  consumed  with  curi- 
osity to  know  if  Mr.  Moore  altered  the  pur- 
pose of  his  book  as  he  went  on.  I  had 
divined  a  book  almost  entirely  about  St. 

136 


GEORGE  MOORE 


Paul,  and  looked  forward  to  a  Mr.  Moore 
who,  having  failed  in  works,  should  justify 
himself  as  St.  Paul  justified  himself,  by 
faith.  But  instead  of  this  rugged,  hearty 
optimist  as  principal  hero  I  find  the  lov- 
able, delicate,  sceptically-minded  Joseph  of 
Arimathsea  who  drew  his  Messiah  rather  out 
of  his  own  warm  heart  than  out  of  any 
profound  intellectual  adventure.  The  story 
leads  one  with  wonderful  skill  through 
Joseph's  many  searchings  after  a  prophet 
to  his  meeting  with  the  Galilean  Essene. 
After  the  crucifixion  and  disillusionment  of 
Jesus,  the  prop  that  Joseph  gave  the  story 
is  cunningly  withdrawn,  and  the  way  is 
prepared  by  the  account  of  Jesus'  absorption 
in  the  daily  common  task  of  shepherd  on 
the  hills  for  the  complete  self-realisation 
that  came  to  him  with  the  dramatic  entrance 
of  Paul.  Paul's  occupation  of  the  stage  is 
somewhat  violent,  but  his  time  there  is 
brief  if  noisy,  and  the  book  dies  away  in 
silence  with  his  arrival  at  Rome.  I  had 
imagined  a  development  of  the  character  of 
Paul.  But  Paul's  character  has  no  develop- 
ment. It  springs  on  the  page  fully  armed, 
and  remains  there  mail-clad  and  unchanging. 
The  curtain  goes  down  on  Paul's  iron-bound 
mind. 

Mr.  Moore  has  chosen  an  extraordinary 
theme,  and  that  he  has  been  able  to  raise  the 
disillusioned,   broken  prophet  into  a  being 

137 


GEORGE  MOORE 


more  nearly  divine  than  he  who  was  crucified 
because  he  claimed  divinity,  we  must  admit 
to  be  a  great  achievement,  if  we  are  content 
to  waive  the  question — a  literary  as  well  as 
a  moral  question — whether  any  writer  is 
justified  in  breaking  up  the  mould  of  such 
a  story  as  the  Gospel  story. 

He  has  given  us  more  than  the  ravelled 
thread  such  an  attempt  might  produce. 
He  has  given  us  an  absorbing  study  in  a 
rare  psychology,  as  well  as  a'  complete 
realisation  of  a  land  of  milk  and  honey,  of 
deserts  and  ravines  and  lakes,  fierce  and 
tender,  forbidding,  stern  and  bountiful,  a 
land  that  could  produce  a  truculent  anthro- 
pomorphic deity  made  in  the  image  of  its 
own  inhabitants,  and  yet  gave  humanity 
the  Divine  Shepherd  of  the  Psalms  and  the 
compassionate  and  gracious  figure  that  has 
allured  Christendom  for  2000  years. 

Mr.  Moore  has  put  some  of  his  best  writing 
into  "  The  Brook  Kerith."  There  are  beauti- 
ful passages  that  describe  Joseph  and  Azariah 
roaming  in  the  woods  about  Arimathsea. 
The  silence  of  the  forest,  "if  silence  it  could 
be  called,  for  when  they  listened  the  silence 
was  full  of  sound,  innumerable  little  sounds, 
some  of  which  they  recognised  ;  but  it  was 
not  the  hum  of  insects,  or  the  chirp  of  a 
bird,  or  the  snapping  of  a  rotten  twig  that 
filled  Joseph  with  awe,  but  something  that 
he  could  neither  see  nor  hear  nor  smell  nor 

138 


GEORGE  MOORE 


touch.  The  life  of  trees — is  that  it  ?  he 
asked  himself.  A  remote  and  mysterious 
life  was  certainly  breathing  about  him  and  he 
regretted  he  was  without  a  sense  to  appre- 
hend this  life." 

The  meeting  between  Jesus  and  Joseph 
by  the  Lake  of  Galilee  is  related  as  follows  : — 

"  Joseph  could  re-see  the  plain  covered 
with  beautiful  grasses  and  flowers,  with  low 
flowering  bushes  waving  over  dusky  head- 
lands, for  it  was  dark  when  they  crossed  the 
plain  ;  and  they  had  heard  rather  than  seen 
the  rushing  stream,  bubbling  out  of  the 
earth  making  music  in  the  still  night.  He 
knew  the  stream  from  early  childhood,  but 
he  had  never  really  known  it  until  he  stood 
with  Jesus  under  the  stars  by  the  narrow 
pathway  cut  in  the  shoulder  of  the  hill, 
whither  the  way  leads  to  Capernaum,  for 
it  was  there  that  Jesus  took  his  hands  and 
said  the  words  '  Our  Father  which  is  in 
Heaven.'  At  these  words  their  eyes  were 
raised  to  the  skies,  and  Jesus  said  :  Whoever 
admires  the  stars  and  the  flowers  finds  God 
in  his  heart  and  sees  him  in  his  neighbours' 
face.  And  ...  he  recalled  the  moment  that 
Jesus  turned  from  him  abruptly  and  passed 
into  the  shadow  of  the  hillside  that  fell 
across  the  flowering  mead.  He  heard  his 
footsteps  and  had  listened,  repressing  the 
passionate  desire  to  follow  him  and  to  say  : 
Having  found  thee,  I  can  leave  thee  never 

139 


GEORGE  MOORE 


again  .  .  .  through  the  myrtle  bushes  he 
could  hear  the  streams  singing  their  way 
down  to  the  lake,  and  when  he  came  to  the 
lake's  edge  he  heard  the  warble  that  came 
into  his  ear  when  he  was  a  little  child,  which 
it  retained  always.  He  heard  it  in  Egypt 
under  the  pyramids,  and  the  cataracts  of 
the  Nile  were  not  able  to  silence  it  in  his 
ears."  ..."  One  of  those  moments  when 
the  soul  of  man  seems  to  break,  to  yearn 
for  that  original  unity  out  of  which  some  sad 
fate  has  cast  it — a  moment  when  the  world 
seems  to  be  one  thing,  not  several  things  ; 
the  stars  and  the  stream,  the  colours  afloat 
on  the  stream,  the  birds'  song  and  the  words 
of  Jesus." 

I  have  made  these  quotations,  though  I 
do  not  care  to  make  quotations,  because 
they  seem  to  me  to  convey  some  idea  of  the 
musical  undertone  in  which  the  book  is 
written.  A  great  deal  of  it  is  in  prose  like 
the  warbling  water  that  Joseph  heard.  ^Yet 
beautiful  as  much  of  the  book  is,  is  not  Mr. 
Moore  in  writing  it  like  unto  those  rational- 
ising writers  who  broke  up  the  mould  of  the 
old  pagan  beliefs  of  Greece  and  Rome, 
making  indeed  a  literature  but  defrauding 
the  world  of  deity  ?  He  puts  upon  the  God- 
head feet  of  clay,  successor  to  those  who  in 
turn  have  resolved  into  a  philosophic  ration- 
alism every  divine  tale  that  blessed  hu- 
manity. 

140 


GEORGE  MOORE 


"  The  Brook  Kerith  "  is  an  epilogue  to  a 
beautiful  story  written  by  a  man  tired  of 
the  theme,  yet  who  cannot  invent  anything 
more  beautiful  than  the  story  he  wrecks. 
He  has  no  faith  in  any  new  vision,  nothing 
wherewith  to  build  up  a  new  spiritual 
romance  to  make  the  world  breathless  with 
fresh  beauty. 


141 


XVIII 

I  have  written  in  this  book  at  some  length 
of  Mr.  Moore  as  an  Irishman  because 
although  he  has  lived  the  greater  part  of  his 
life  in  England  and  France,  during  the  years 
that  he  lived  here  his  house  in  Ely  Place 
was  a  centre  in  its  way  for  the  literary  folk 
in  Dublin  and  his  influence  is  of  some  account. 
There  has  always  been  a  certain  sterility  in 
Irish  ideals  ;  we  reach  for  a  star  or  we 
scramble  lower  down  for  a  terrestrial  bauble. 
In  all  their  aims  high  and  low  Irishmen 
have  a  tragical  alienation  from  life.  They 
became  peasant  proprietors  more  because 
their  fields  were  symbolic  of  the  four  fields 
of  Kathleen  ni  Houlihan  than  because  they 
might  be  sown  and  harvested  and  produce 
the  food  of  man.  They  value  their  municipal 
privileges  more  for  the  sense  of  power  these 
confer  than  from  any  serious  intention  of 
using  these  powers  for  simple  human  needs 
and  comforts.  Their  political  power  has 
been  treated  as  a  game  as  diverting  as 
musical  chairs  at  a  children's  party,  sitting, 
acting  and  voting  to  meaningless  party  tunes 
played  at  hazard  and  stopped  at  hazard. 
If  this  were  not  so,  would  we  have  our  land 

142 


GEORGE  MOORE 


in  grass,  our  towns  and  cities  in  slums, 
and  our  country  without  a  human  hope  to 
break  down  the  barriers  that  our  several 
quests  have  imposed  upon  us  ? 

Mr.  Moore  as  a  man  of  feeling  was  no 
doubt  moved  by  this  sterility  in  Irish  ideals, 
and  he  attempted  almost  brutally  to  intro- 
duce a  personal  and  human  ideal  in  Irish 
literature.  His  literary  theories  might  in 
time  have  justified  themselves  here,  had  he 
not  been  deflected  by  his  own  excessive 
egoism  from  any  serious  attempt  on  the 
heart  of  Ireland.  Where  he  proved  himself 
stupid  was  in  assuming,  in  his  attempt  to 
carry  his  literary  theories  into  practice, 
that  the  life  to  be  expressed  here  in  literature 
was  of  the  same  quality  as  the  life  to  be 
expressed  in  other  countries.  Humanity  in 
Ireland  has  never  become  self-conscious.  We 
are  intensely  conscious  of  our  nationalism, 
of  our  imperialism,  our  religion,  Catholic 
and  Protestant,  but  beyond  these  we  are 
the  least  introspective  race  in  Europe.  Mr. 
Moore's  art  is  self-conscious  and  introspec- 
tive, a  very  complete  expression  of  the 
humanity  to  which  he  was  most  accustomed. 
His  art  went  all  astray  in  Ireland.  He  sup- 
posed in  us  a  feverish  interest  in  sex.  Ire- 
land regards  sex,  when  she  regards  it  at  all, 
with  an  entirely  primitive  and  practical  eye. 
Love  in  Mr.  Moore's  use  of  the  word  she 
would  consider  balderdash.    She  is  approach- 

143 


GEORGE  MOORE 


able  to  the  literary  explorer  on  the  side  of 
the  affections.  Friendship  and  affection 
are  extremely  strong  here,  but  they  are  not 
self-conscious.  Mr.  Moore,  whose  nature,  as 
I  have  said  elsewhere,  fits  him  much  more 
to  write  of  affection  than  of  passion,  might, 
had  he  been  patient,  truly  have  served 
Irish  literature  and  affected  Irish  life.  His 
impatience  and  perverseness  hindered  him. 
This  aspect  of  Irish  life  has  never  had  an 
interpreter  worthy  of  it,  and  Mr.  Moore 
might  have  been  that  interpreter.  I  think 
we  want  an  interpreter,  and  that  perhaps 
the  time  has  come  for  one,  though  it  is 
difficult  for  one  to  realise  this  who  has  seen 
an  Ireland  grow  more  and  more  obsessed 
by  the  cinema  and  the  penny  novelette.  The 
impossible  cracksman  of  the  one  and  the 
impossible  duke  of  the  other  are  both  as 
far  away  from  life  as  any  legend  of  Saint 
or  Sidhe.  We  are  in  a  sorry  plight,  whom  a 
foolish  system  of  education  has  robbed  of 
those  bardic  heroes  who  should  have  been 
the  natural  exemplars  of  our  youth.  What 
room  was  there  in  our  school  primers  for  the 
extravagant  Gaelic  heart  ?  Our  intellects 
were  not  bred  true  to  type  and  we  have  a 
mongrel  taste.  He  was  a  wise  man,  that 
Danish  bishop  Grundtvig,  who  reared  his 
High  School  pupils  on  their  native  hero  tales. 
The  ordered  social  life  of  rural  Denmark  is 
the  result  of  that  inspiration.    Still  I  cannot 

144 


GEORGE  MOORE 


imagine  Mr.  Moore  as  the  novelist  of  the 
Red  Branch  or  the  Fianna. 

I  write  this  last  chapter  of  my  book  in  a 
city  that  has  been  shattered  by  the  big  guns 
of  modern  warfare.  It  is  a  heavy  ending 
for  a  book  begun  with  a  light  heart.  With 
every  twenty-five  years  of  Irish  life  we 
expect  a  tragedy,  with  every  fifty  years  it 
inevitably  comes.  Can  any  ruling  country 
afford  to  neglect  such  portents  ?  Can  it  be 
stupid  enough  to  imagine  that  a  nation 
whose  belief  in  its  own  high  destiny  is  so 
profound  that  seven  hundred  years  of  Eng- 
lish domination  have  failed  to  obliterate  it, 
will  ever  lose  that  hope  ?  One  hundred  and 
eighteen  years  have  passed  since  the  last 
passionate  outburst  of  that  hope,  and  the 
revolution  of  1916  is  but  begun.  The  spirit 
that  inspired  it  is  no  less  fervent  than  it  was 
then,  and  is  as  widely  spread  in  Ireland, 
for  all  the  protests  of  our  members  at  West- 
minster. It  may  be  a  town  movement  now 
and  in  alliance  with  a  hungry  labour,  as  it 
was  a  country  movement  then  and  in 
alliance  with  a  hungry  tenantry.  It  is  the 
same  movement,  it  possesses  hearts  as  brave 
and  martyrs  as  willing.  One  portion  of 
Ireland  expresses  its  desire  for  freedom  of 
government  by  constitutional  methods  and 
by  taking  arms  to  serve  England,  one  by 
taking  arms  against  England.  This  desire 
K  145 


GEORGE  MOORE 


should  appeal  to  a  people  like  the  English 
who  were  wont  to  love  freedom  themselves 
and  who  fought  for  it  so  bravely  against 
their  kings  and  nobles  ;  who  wrung  from 
them  by  insurrection  and  by  civil  wars  the 
charters  of  their  constitution .  What  English- 
man but  thinks  with  pride  of  how  the  town 
of  York  held  all  England  at  bay  and  let  its 
king  batter  vainly  at  its  gates,  till  he  had 
yielded  it  the  charter  of  its  civic  rights  ? 
Are  we  to  have  no  charters  in  Ireland  but 
dishonoured  charters,  no  treaties  but  broken 
treaties  ?  Yet  I  would  be  just  to  England. 
She  is  surely  in  a  desperate  strait,  when 
within  her  own  borders  she  is  compelled  to 
treat  asa"  scrap  of  paper  "  the  most  cher- 
ished charter  of  her  people's  liberties,  the 
Habeas  Corpus  Act.  That  she  should  sus- 
pend it  here  is  natural  enough,  angered  as 
she  was  at  our  disaffection  and  at  the  timing 
of  our  revolution.  That  she  suspended  it 
at  home  is  a  bad  omen  in  a  country  which 
has  grown  great  through  its  passion  for  in- 
dividual liberty. 

It  may  seem  to  my  readers  as  if  I  had 
shoved  Mr.  Moore  aside  in  the  preceding 
paragraphs.  Surely,  they  may  say,  I  did 
not  dream  that  there  was  any  part  in  our 
recent  tragedy  that  Mr.  Moore  might  have 
been  cast  for.  I  have  not  done  with  Mr. 
Moore  at  all,  though  it  was  no  part  of  my 
plan  in  this  book  to  arraign  him  or  any 

146 


GEORGE  MOORE 


absenting  Irishman  at  the  bar  of  his  country 
and  ask  him  to  show  cause  why  he  has  not 
devoted  such  gifts  as  were  his  to  her  service. 
That  would  be  an  absurd  position  for  me  to 
assume  ;  Mr.  Moore  at  the  helm  in  Dublin 
during  such  a  storm  as  has  broken  here 
would  be  an  absurd  spectacle.  Yet  it 
should  not  be  unnatural  for  an  Irishman  to 
be  seen  in  the  service  of  his  country.  Mr. 
Edward  Marty n,  who  has  never  been  a 
sentimentalist  about  Ireland,  and  who  has 
indeed  given  her  many  shrewd  knocks,  has 
believed  himself  to  have  a  duty  towards 
the  country  whence  he  draws  his  income 
and  has  fulfilled  that  duty.  Sir  Horace 
Plunkett  has  acknowledged  the  same  obli- 
gation ;  so  too  has  "  J3." 

Had  Mr.  Moore  any  gifts  that  he  might 
have  given  to  Ireland  ?  I  believe  his  frank- 
ness might  have  been  of  great  benefit  to  v 
our  public  life,  and  his  intense  concern  with 
human  life  and  emotion  might  have  im- 
parted a  warmth  to  our  literature  that  is 
missing  from  it  now.  The  spirit  and  the 
flesh  are  very  far  apart  in  Ireland.  So  un- 
natural a  distance  is  between  them  that  the 
conquest  of  the  material  by  the  spiritual, 
which  is,  I  suppose,  the  end  of  all  religion, 
promises  to  be  a  long  and  tedious  process 
here.  I  remember  the  sufferings  inflicted 
on  Mr.  Edward  Martyn  by  the  earthliness 
of  the  feminine  soprano  in  Church  music 

147 


GEORGE  MOORE 


and  how  he  fought  for  the  aloofness  of  the 
boyish  treble.  He  won  too,  but  I  think  he 
had  done  better  had  he  waited  for  the  aloof- 
ness of  Palestrina  to  capture  the  feminine 
soprano.  The  separation  of  the  spirit  and 
the  flesh,  the  churches  tell  us  of,  will  surely 
be  done  much  more  efficiently  hereafter 
than  we  can  do  it  now.  The  purpose  of  our 
existence  here  is  more  properly  to  bring 
heaven  to  earth.  Yet  Mr.  Moore  would  surely 
be  a  most  inappropriate  prophet  of  such  a 
creed.  Heaven  may  have  cast  him  for  this 
end,  but  the  rival  establishment  intervened. 
I  often  wonder  what  effect  upon  our 
normal  constitution  here  in  Ireland  had  all 
the  movement  of  that  febrile  time  that  we 
call  the  Irish  literary  revival.  Has  any 
intellectuality  at  all  emerged  out  of  it,  any 
public  opinion,  any  essentially  national  flavour 
in  our  life  ?  True,  some  of  our  educational 
establishments  are  aware  now  of  what  was 
then  unknown  to  them,  that  in  Mr.  Yeats 
and  "  M "  we  have  poets  of  whom  any 
nation  should  be  proud.  It  can  hardly 
happen  now  as  in  those  days  when  one 
Alexandra  College  student  whispered  to 
another  that  she  had  heard  by  way  of  a 
French  review  that  there  was  a  literary 
movement  in  Ireland.  Yet  our  public  life 
in  Ireland  is  as  barren  of  thinking  as  it  ever 
was  and  there  is  no  true  cohesion  amongst 
us,  though  there  are  many  enforced  unities. 

148 


GEORGE  MOORE 


There  has  been  no  lack  of  courage  in  Ire- 
land ;  there  never  is,  but  even  our  courage 
has  a  fatal  quality.  Mr.  Moore  has  a  moral 
courage  that  he  has  developed  to  the  point 
where  it  becomes  immorality,  as  most  of 
his  friends  realised  when  they  read  his  "  Ave, 
Salve  and  Vale."  He  was  content  to  rear 
his  monument  in  the  Trilogy,  and  though 
one  may  regret  that  he  has  not  a  nobler 
ambition,  it  is  in  a  sense  an  achievement. 
A  century  hence  people  wTill  search  in  it  as 
eagerly  as  they  search  in  Hogg  and  Trelawney 
for  memories  of  Shelley  and  Byron.  Mr. 
Yeats  and  his  literary  contemporaries  in 
Ireland  may  have  a  more  kindly,  but  they 
never  will  have  a  more  brilliant,  chronicler. 
Literary  history  must  accord  Mr.  Moore  a 
place  amongst  the  most  brilliant  and  varied 
writers  of  our  time.  Still,  he  will  be  remem- 
bered less  by  the  creations  of  his  imagina- 
tion than  for  his  malicious  and  witty  account 
of  his  contemporaries. 

In  the  "  Memoirs  of  My  Bead  Life,"  he 
wished  that  his  body  after  death  might  be 
cremated  and  the  ashes  enclosed  in  a  Greek 
vase,  with  dancing  fauns  and  nymphs 
modelled  around  its  curves,  but  it  would  be 
far  more  appropriate  to  place  round  the  vase 
which  holds  his  ashes  the  figures  of  the  Irish 
literary  revival,  with  George  Moore  as  Pan 
playing  on  his  pipes  the  movement  of  their 
dance. 

149 


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